What will be the size of the “Brown Bounce“? A key question in our Predicting 2007 competition, to be published tomorrow, will be on the effect of a new Labour leader. What will be the increase in the average of Populus/ICM/YouGov surveys of a new person taking over. Here the change in the PBC Polling Average in the first month is what we are seeking. Also what will Labour’s position be by the same measure two months afterwards? Another of…
Wouldn’t it be nice…..If we could get from here….. …to here? Well, perhaps we can…. I just DID!! The second graph was created using only the few datapoints from the first graph, and a clever box-of-tricks called the Kalman Filter. What on earth is a Kalman Filter? Believe it or not, it is a statistical routine that originated in the 1960s in the fields of engineering and signal processing. The Kalman Filter is mathematically proven to be the optimal way…
Putting today’s Communicate Research figures into the Baxter calculator The above is from Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus site and shows what happens if you put the party shares from this morning’s Communicate Research poll for the Independent into his Commons seat predictor. For the numbers the pollster reports are, compared with last month’s figures CON 36 (+2): LAB 37 (+1): LD 14 (-3). The fieldwork for the survey took place in the week before Christmas and ended two days before…
Will his 9/11 families strategy rebound? If you look at the betting on who will get the Republican nomination for the 2008 White House race there is only one person in it – the Vietnam veteran and Senator from Arizona, John McCain. His price is now at 1.36/1 and is way ahead of the second favourite, the ex-Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani. Yet if you check the latest polls a different picture emerges – Giuliani has significant leads over…
But why no voting intention figures? The December poll from Communicate Research is out this morning in the Independent but the online edition, at least, does not appear to feature voting intention figures. These were clearly asked because breakdowns of how supporters of different parties answered some of the questions are included in the story. Maybe that detail will come tomorrow. Andrew Grice, the paper’s political editor, puts the focus on the “who would make the best PM” question where…
How September’s 125/1 shot is making the running The long holiday weekend and for all but one of the declared candidates in Labour’s deputy race a chance to relax with their families or to get away from the political process. For John Cruddas, however, this was the ideal time to maximise the headlines on what is always a very slow news period. So his warning about Labour’s membership declining at 27,000 a year made it onto most of the bulletins…
PBC’s first ever poster and David R get the prizes The first person ever to post a comment on PBC, Tim Hill (AKA Big Tall Tim) and David R are the winners of our two outstanding competitions – on the US Mid Terms and the “2006 Prediction Contest“. Tim, whose first post from March 29th 2004 is reproduced above, is a close friend and is a former PPC and Councillor for the Lib Dems in Bedfordshire. These were the top…
Happy Christmas to everybody? A new report from Alexa, the Amazon off-shoot that monitors internet traffic world-wide, places Politicalbetting.com as the sixth most visited news and media politics site in the UK ahead of even the sites of those well established political journals the New Statesman and the Spectator. YouGov is up there at number two because of all the traffic generated by its online polling. In the past week users filling in surveys have given it a page view…