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…
But will the party’s “odds-on jinx” continue? The chart shows the best betting odds for the Ealing Southall by election, expressed as an implied probability of victory, over the weekend. So if the markets have got this right then Gordon will survive his first serious electoral test. The main oddity is that I cannot recall a by election ever where the price on the third favourite was so tight. But in the last two by elections where Labour went into…
It’s just been confirmed that Boris Johnson IS to seek the Tory nomination to stand for the Mayor of London next May. On that day also there will be the elections for the London Assembly which in 2000 and 2004 have seen the Tories winning the popular vote across London. The reason that they failed in the Mayoral race is that so many Tory and Lib Dem supporters switched to Ken in the Mayor ballot. Can Boris retain the Tory…
Could this be an election battleground? Listening to Radio Four’s “Any Questions” while driving home from Burgundy on Saturday I was very struck by the way the Tory approach to marriage which has come out of the Iain Duncan Smith Social Justice Commission seemed to be resonating with the audience. This is backed up by the other part of the latest ICM poll – the results of which are featured in the Daily Telegraph this morning and reproduced above. One…
The polls are good – so why no betting move for an early election? In a message that got held up in the spam filter Red Flag asked why we did not publish a picture this morning of seven smiling Gordons to illustrate graphically the lead that today’s ICM poll reported for Labour. Fair enough – but the big news picture was that of Tony Lit and Tony Blair. Also I only got back home from holiday this afternoon and…