A London activist’s view of the Boris and Ken show Ken Livingstone said last week that Boris Johnson will provide him with the toughest challenge of his career, assuming the former is selected to run for Mayor of London, by the Conservatives. That is not quite correct. Fighting, and losing, Hampstead in 1979 must have been tougher, but there seems no doubt that he will face the hardest of his three campaigns for London Mayor. The London Mayor is elected…
Will the Tories do disproportionately better in Ashcroft-funded seats ? This is Michael Ashcroft who in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List was placed in position 87 with an estimated wealth of £800m. He has been a major donor to the Tory party and before the 2005 general election, as was reported here, he hand-picked a group of Tory candidates in marginal constituencies and then was responsible for providing extra attention and funding to help them with their campaigns. As…
Can you predict the date and the pollster? With Labour having established a significant margin in all the main polls since Gordon moved in can you predict when, if ever before the general election, a poll will show Brown’s party to be either level-pegging or with a deficit? In the comment thread below please state, to the day, the actual date when this will happen and as a tie-breaker can you name the pollster? If you think that this is…
Could the outbreak close off the possibility of an October election? Six and a half years ago the last outbreak of foot and moth disease caused Tony Blair to move back the general election date as well as the local elections from the first week in May until June. There was even controversy then because the disease was not fully eradicated at the time the poll was called. For months last time the harrowing pictures of livestock being destroyed and…
The by elections help us to another record breaking month July was another record breaking month on Politicalbetting. We had a total of 759,452 hits which was only the second time we have been above the three-quarters of a million mark. The last month when this happened was in May when the total finished up at more than 772,000. Looking at the daily data, parts of which are recorded here, we got a huge boost on the day of and…
Is Labour’s margin really as big as it seems? Now here’s a funny thing – in the three Guardian ICM polls for January-March 2007 the firm was reporting leads for Cameron’s party of 6% – 10%. Yet looking at the raw data FEWER people were telling the pollster then that they planned to vote Conservative than in ICM’s three published polls in July. So for the 2007 Q1 surveys the average number of people saying they would vote Tory was…
Is Gordon following the plan of Blair’s former pollster? The revelation in the Daily Mirror this morning of a 2005 paper written by the ex-Blair pollster and major architect of NuLab, Philip Gould, raises the questions – is Gordon following the strategy and, if so, does this provide further evidence that an early general election is on the cards? Certainly what has happened in the past month seems to fit with what Gould was advising two years ago. This is…
What do we think of the Electoral Commission’s conclusions? As the BBC is reporting this morning all web and phone voting pilots should be halted according to a report from the Electoral Commission on the voting experiments that took place in parts of England in May 3rd. Then there were a series of trials including internet and phone voting, electronic counting, insisting that voters sign for their forms, and making town centre facilities available ahead of polling day so people…