Does Watson’s campaign approach work? This is Tom Watson – the Labour MP for West Bromwich and campaign manager in Ealing Southall who has a very personal approach to campaigning – he gets personal. Rather than focus on policy or issues his big idea is to find what’s perceived as a weakness in the character of the opposition candidate he most fears and then attacks and attacks it. At Birmingham Hodge Hill in July 2004 he sought to destroy the…
Why have Labour called in the police if its not true? The very first intimation in February 2006 that something sensational was about to happen in the Dunfermline by election was when it started to emerge that the Lib Dems were doing well with the postal vote – which are opened and verified in front of party officials before the polls open. At the time I reported that amongst Lib Dems “There was a buzz amongst their workers after the…
Is everybody taking Blair’s ex-seat for granted? While all the attention has been on Ealing Southall could Tony Blair’s former seat at Sedgefield be the election that causes the biggest surprise tomorrow? With a Labour share in 2005 at more than 58 percent this surely should be a certainty. But therein could lie the ingredients for a shock. For it might be hard to motivate the Labour supporters to go out and vote. At the same time the impression is…
Is following the markets a good idea? Ever since the Dunfermline by-election in February 2006, when I bottled out of most of my Lib Dem position in the final half hour, I have been very wary of the predictive powers of punters as evidenced in betting price movements. Then, it will be recalled, the Labour price was 1/5 just as the returning officer started to announce the result. Crazy. What I find interesting about the current Ealing Southall market on…
How long can we expect the polling bounce to last? The above table, adapted from UK Polling Report, shows what happened to the polls when John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher in November 1990 – the last time a Prime Minister was replaced mid-term. With all the talk of a general election in the air a critical issue will, surely, be the expected length of Gordon’s poll bounce. Clearly new or different faces and a new approach had a very marked…
Can you predict the outcome in the two by-elections? For the first time, a pbc prediction competition will be by “secret ballot” – simply download the spreadsheet below, save it to your desktop or similar location, make your predictions, and email it back as an attachment to a dedicated email address, pbpredcomp@yahoo.co.uk Do not post your predictions in this thread, as they will not be entered into the competition. The spreadsheet is here: July 2007 By-Election Competition The standard scoring…
Is this good news for Dave from ICM? This is from the detailed data that ICM has just made available from the News of the World part of the survey that was published on Sunday. The results from the question ” Now that Gordon Brown has taken over, and faces David Cameron for the Conservatives and Ming Campbell for the Liberal Democrats, do you feel that you are becoming warmer to the idea of supporting…?” have been reported in some…
ONE The only electors whose views matter are the 30-40% of Londoners that bother to vote at local elections – a high level of name recognition could matter a lot. TWO The inherent element in the UK electoral system that skews General Elections in favour of Labour works in precisely the opposite way in the London Mayoral Election where it’s aggregate votes across the capital that count not seats. THREE There are substantially higher turn-out rates in outer Tory and…