The polling feast continues.. Normally this is a time of year when we have to put up with a polling-free period. In August 2006 just two national surveys were carried out and we had to wait until the final week of the month before we got the figures. This year, with a new prime minister and change in the air, the polls are coming thick and fast and on top of the Sun’s Ipsos-Mori survey, the YouGov poll for the…
But how much is down to not weighting by likelihood to vote? A new YouGov poll for tomorrow’s Sunday Times has Labour 10% ahead and the vote shares back at 2001 general election levels. These are the shares compared with the last YouGov poll at the end of July – CON 32% (nc): LAB 42%(+1): LD 14% (-2) So the big change has been a drop in the Lib Dem share to 14% – a level they were at in…
Ipsos-Mori finds 81% in favour the EU treaty being put to the vote The second part of today’s Ipsos-Mori poll for the Sun asked about whether there should be a referendum on the EU treaty and how people would vote. The above are the findings to both questions – an overwhelming majority wanting a referendum and a much closer view on what voters would do in the event of such a ballot. The hard message for the government is that…
Labour’s lead down a point to 5% The August poll by Ipsos-Mori in the Sun shows a slight reduction in the Labour lead compared with July and might just take the heat out of the 2007 general election suggestions. The shares are with changes on last month – CON 33%(-2): LAB 38%(-3): LDM 15%(nc). The striking feature of the numbers is the sharp cut-back in the the proportion saying they would vote for the three main parties – 86% in…
The Importance of Leeds One favourite piece of lazy journalism is to assert that “the Conservatives have no MPs/Councillors in the main Northern cities†and that, without these, they cannot win a Parliamentary majority. In fact, there are hundreds of Conservative councillors in the urban North, and the main Northern cities usually cited, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield are irrelevant to the Conservatives’ Parliamentary chances. The Conservatives could win an overall majority of 100, without coming close to winning a…
Are there better ways of predicting likelihood to vote? A local party ward organisation that I’m familiar with was one of the first to get its records computerised and can access detailed data on individual electors going back for more than two decades. Not only can you see how they responded to canvassers on each occasion that they were contacted since the late 1980s but there’s also a record of whether they voted or not. For it’s not often appreciated…
What’s this going to mean politically? Extraordinarily this story from the Financial Times is not covered on the main news page of BBC online. Yet the size of the intervention – an injection of 95 million billion euros into the money markets – sounds too huge to be confined to the business pages. I’m no expert on financial markets but this does look worrying and could have a big political impact. To my mind it makes an early election looks…
Could the emerging opposition “attack dog” damage Brown? Go into Google, type in “Chris Grayling MP”, click on the “news” search button and the above is what you get. A whole series of references to attacks that he has made on the government which might not be commanding the big headlines at the moment but, I am told, are starting to irritate the Labour hierarchy. For the 46 year old Epsom MP and shadow work and pension secretary is fast…