There is money to be made on a turnout of 60% or more With the coming campaign looking as though it is going to be a bitter fight between Labour and Michael Howard we expect that the turnout will be substantially higher than the 59% recorded in 2001. That was a record low because almost from the start it looked like what in boxing they would deem a mismatch. William Hague’s Tories never seemed like credible challenger, the result appeared…
Who is winning the spin wars? As Labour found out with the tale of Jennifer’s Ear during the 1992 election campaign, or the case of Rose Addis, championed by, the then Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, two years ago, raising specific NHS cases like Margaret Dixon is a high risk strategy. Usually such moves rebound on the party putting forward the case and the extraordinary thing about this week’s events is that the Tory spin machine has had the confidence…
Have they been beaten off by the Kilroy-Silk, Sykes and Crosby shows?. Just 22 weeks ago today UKIP pushed the Tories into 4th place in the Hartlepool by-election. A couple of days later YouGov and Populus recorded Tory shares of 28 and 29%. The talk on the site and elsewhere was of a UKIP-driven “Tory meltdown” with many contributors predicting double figure vote shares for the anti-EU party. Then the tensions between Robert Kilroy-Silk and the UKIP leadeship got bigger,…
Anybody interested in the Blair’s majority in Sedgefield market should read this by Michael White, the Guardian’s political editor. Tony Blair faces the prospect of a celebrity anti-war candidate seeking to unseat him in his constituency stronghold of Sedgfield at the coming general election if a suitably wholesome figure can be found to follow Martin Bell’s 1997 example. The chances of Britain waking up on May 6 with a Labour government but no elected Labour leader remain largely in the…
Anybody would think that there’s an election coming up! With the bookies trying to repeat the bonanza they enjoyed with the US presidential race lots of effort is going on to create betting interest on May 5, if that is when it is. The challenge is that unlike last November the UK election is seen as a foregone conclusion – the only question at issue being the size of Blair’s majority. IG Index has just opened this a a spread…
Get invited more and increase your weighting Ten days ago I reported here how in recent surveys the weighting given to Sun readers was almost double that attached to Guardian and Indy readers. After doing that piece I decided to see if I could improve the chances of me being invited to take part in polls by changing the basic information that YG have stored on me and, presumably, is used to determine which of the 50,000+ members on their…
Betting opens on Folkestone How well will the Lib Dems do with their decapitation target number one – Michael Howard? Do they have any chance at all making serious inroads into the Tory leader’s majority in Folkestone? If you think that they do then a new market offers 2/1 against the Tory leader’s majority being cut. It’s 4/11 on Howards majority increasing. So the LDs don’t have to take the seat – just reduce the majority There is a similar…
Frequent site contributor, Mark Jones – we know him a CymruMark – has asked if he can announce his canditature for Plaid Cymru in the Vale of Clwyd on Politicalbetting. Rhyl, in the constituency, came to prominence last time because it was there that John Prescott got involved in his famous punch up. Mark said: I chose to launch on political betting .com because it has become the key site on the internet to discuss possible outcomes for the general…