Just nine points now separate the three main parties A YouGov poll to be published in the Sunday Times tomorrow sees both Labour and the Tories going down and the Lib Dems moving up to 25%. The figures showing the changes since the last YouGov poll before Christmas are: LAB 34(-1): CON 31(-1): LD 25(+2) Labour’s 34% is the lowest share from the internet pollster since August The Tories’ 31% is the second lowest share with YouGov for more than…
Can the campaign magic of last time repeat itself? Whatever your allegiance you have to concede that the Labour campaign in 2001 was totally brilliant. Although it’s margin over the Tories was nearly a quarter down on 1997, this did not translate into many seats changing hands because Tony Blair’s party piled on the votes in the only seats that mattered – the marginals it was defending. This is shown by the way it performed in each category of seat…
You can bet against -but, for now, not for For some time we’ve been urging the bookmakers, particularly the ones we have a partnership with, to open up new betting markets and create means of having a punt on issues like whether George Galloway will get back into Parliament. One of them, the spread firm IG Index, has now broadened its General Election market to include Galloway’s Respect party as well as the Scottish and Welsh national parties. The latest…
The money piles on Labour The spread-betting prices on the number of seats the parties will win at the General Election has moved even further away from the Tories as punters assimilate the recent bad polls and the effect of the Robert Jackson defection. In new market shifts tonight the latest spreads from IG Index have LAB 359 – 366 (+5): CON 184 – 191 (-5): LD 70 – 74 (+1). In just seven weeks the Labour buy price has…
Choose from Blair,Brown, Howard or Kennedy I’m on the YouGov panel and I’ve just been polled – I guess for one of the Sunday papers. One interesting question was – if your car broke down who would you like to help you – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Michael Howard or Charles Kennedy? Maybe it’s me but I could not imagine any of the four being able to offer any practical help. Michael Howard would not want to get his hands…
Kilroy-Sillk to annouce his intentions tonight With Robert Kilroy-Silk set to announce tonight whether he is leaving UKIP the opportunity to make a profit on the party doing badly has receded after its price has been marked down sharply on the spread-betting markets. On Christmas Eve we suggested that a sell bet on the party at the then price of just one seat with one firm looked like a good profit opportunity because the only possiblity they had was Robert…
Could the “Vote for me” winner split the anti-Tory vote? Probably the best news of the week for Michael Howard is the decision of the winner of ITV’s “Vote for Me” series, Rodney Hylton-Potts, to stand against him in Folkestone. For if there had been a threat to the Tory leader it was from the Lib Dems who have it down at the top of their “decapitation list” and who might just have eaten into Howard’s 5,900 majority at the…
Some straws to clutch at If the Tories want to think positively there are a number of factors that could mean the election outcome will not be as bad as seems at the moment. “Conventional polls that use interviewers have got it wrong.“ There is a strong argument for saying that poll surveys that use interviewers are overplaying Labour and underplaying the Tories. The difference in Tory shares in interviewer-free polls like YouGov and Rasmussen in 2001 over the normal…