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Exactly a year from today….will YOU be counting YOUR General Election winnings?

7/5/2004 Editor

If Tony Blair/Gordon Brown hold the General Election on the widely predicted date on 05/05/05/ then exactly a year today political gamblers will be counting their losses and adding up their winnings. What do I expect to see? I’m confident that the bets on Labour winning most seats will bear fruit because the Tories would have to be at least 7% ahead to equal Labour. There might be better value by backing the Tories to win second most seats which…

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Would the Lib Dems prop up the seat winner or the vote winner?

6/5/2004 Editor

With both this week’s opinion poll and moves on the spread betting markets in the past 24 hours pointing to the General Election producing a big Tory lead on votes but a big Labour lead on seats attention will surely focus on what the Liberal Democrats would do in such an outcome? The Lib Dems can’t duck this one because the mathematics of the next General Election mean that if there is a hung Parliament then the Tories are bound…

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Predicting low turn-out elections

5/5/2004 Editor

With almost all the parties having launched their local and Euro campaigns for “Super Thursday” on June 10 the nightmare for political gamblers and others who like to predict these things is how do you deal with very low-turnouts? For low-turnouts can completely distort a result making prediction very challenging and can cause politicians and commentators to draw totally wrong conclusions about the way the public feels. Before the 1999 Euro Elections all the polls had support for Labour at…

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Labour recovering slightly – but bad news for all

4/5/2004 Editor

This morning’s poll in the Telegraph by YouGov brings bad news for all three parties at the start of the Euro Elecion campaign. YouGov has picked up the trend recorded in the latest polls by MORI and ICM to show a marginal improvement in Labour’s position even though Tony Blair has been having a torrid time. The change in the gap between Labour and Conservative has, like MORI, improved by one percentage point in Labour’s favour. YouGov is showing Michael…

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Monday Call – May 3 2004

3/5/2004 Editor

NEW – The Politicalbetting.com Market Prices Search Engine Politicalbetting.com now has its own dedicated pages comparing all the latest political betting odds, including betting exchanges, supplied by the Besbetting.com odds search engine. This scans through the main bookmakers offering bets on political markets; identifies market movements and discovers the best prices. Our new agreement with Bestbetting will help us to provide an even better service to our growing user base. UK General Election Tony Blair is in for a terrible…

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Don’t confuse votes with seats..

2/5/2004 Editor

………and don’t confuse seats for votes. A consistent theme on Politicalbetting.com is that political gamblers should not confuse votes for seats. We’ve repeatedly pointed out that because of differing turnouts and the way the Westminster seats are distributed Labour can still win a Commons majority even if its vote slumps by 10% at the next General Election. But there’s another danger that was repeated by the Guardian in its main leader yesterday – do not confuse Labour’s healthy Commons seat…

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Flying blind in London…

1/5/2004 Editor

……………………………………….betting without the aid of opinion polls The next big political betting event – the London Mayoral Election – is less than six weeks away but there has been almost no polling information to guide punters and very little media coverage. Unlike in 2000 just one bookmaker is offering odds and there is a single, but lively, betting exchange market. When Ken Livingstone was first elected in 2000 he was taking on the Labour establishment and his fight made big…

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Are ICM’s Guardian polls including too many non-voters?

30/4/2004 Editor

A big issue for political gamblers in the UK is how you do distinguish between the two polling organisations that were most accurate with the 2001 General Election and who both claim to be “Britain’s most accurate pollster” ICM and YouGov? Is ICM, the Guardian’s pollster, overstating what Labour will get at the General Election because it is giving too much weight to people who say they are not certain whether they will vote? This is a critical question for…

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