Why did Ming’s lead on Hughes 2nd preferences drop 19% in three days? At this stage in the Tory leadership contest there’d been seven Tory member polls and the only outstanding issue was whether or not the 39 year-old’s share would top the 66% mark. Contrast that with the Lib Dem race where the only members’ poll in a newspaper was on January 7th – a few hours before Charles Kennedy’s announcement. This showed that Hughes was being beaten by…
But were too many Labour supporters in the sample? In an interesting ICM poll in today’s News of the World Gordon Brown is rated against David Cameron on a whole series of measures including who would make a “good Prime Minister”. In spite of what some of the headlines are saying the question of who would make “best Prime Minister” was not put. This is not a conventional opinion poll; no questions were asked about voting intention; the only options…
Is Ming Campbell at 6/4 the value bet? The seemingly never-ending saga that is the Lib Dem leadership contest takes on another bizarre twist this morning with both the Guardian and Independent reporting on separate surveys of attendees at Thursday’s London hustings meeting. The challenge for anybody trying to predict the outcome is that the two ex-broadsheet papers come out with completely different findings. The Guardian spoke to 422 people who were there and found Huhne had 152 first preferences…
But good news for whoever wins the Lib Dem contest Two new polls this morning paint a very different picture of how the Tories and Labour are doing but both show a Lib Dem recovery. Mori in the Sun has with changes on the pollster’s last survey a month ago CON 35 (-5): LAB 38 (nc): LD 20 (+3). YouGov in the Telegraph has with changes on the pollster’s last survey 12 days ago CON 38 (+1): LAB 36 (-3):…
But leading Tory donors are not happy When David Cameron was first elected Tory leader just two and a half months ago he raised a few eyebrows both within and outside his party when he appeared to make the environment and global warming his first priority. For this has just not been perceived as a Tory issue. It was Margaret Thatcher, after all, who was attributed with the comment in 1986 that “any man who finds himself on a bus…
Who’ll lose most if “vote farming” is banned? With the outcome of this May’s local elections taking on an increasing importance a key factor could be whether there is a clamp-down on party workers getting involved in the postal vote process. For when turnout drops to 30% or below winning the postal vote battle becomes even more crucial. Now, according to a Guardian report, the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives are pressing the government to put a “national concordat”…
Labour drops two points to the Lib Dems The February ICM survey for the Guardian, which was one of the key points in the PB.C prediction competition, has CON 37%(nc): LAB 34%(-2): LD 21%(+2). So the Conservative lead over Labour returns to where it was at the start of the year and the Lib Dems go back to the share they had before Charles Kennedy resigned. What seems to be happening is that the Tories have moved up 4-5 points…
Time to back Ming at 2/1 What is happening on the Lib Dem leadership betting markets? After a week when the prices on Chris Huhne and Ming Campbell hardly moved – which itself seemed odd – we’ve seen a huge swing to Huhne during the past 36 hours as the chart above shows. This graph traces the best betting price shown as implied probability every six hours for the past three days and the move today has been extraordinary. A…