The latest YouGov poll, published this morning in the Daily Telegraph, shows almost no change in March and would produce a hung parliament. The following is the split together with a projection from Financialcalculus of the distribution of seats at a General Election assuming a universal swing across the whole of the UK. Con 39 – 271 seats Lab 34 – 300 seats LD 20 – 46 seats Thus Labour would be 23 seats short of a Commons majority. YouGov…
A big issue for political gamblers at the next UK General Election will be whether we can trust opinion polls that are carried out online, rather than by the traditional routes of telephone or face-to-face interviews. There’s a huge debate on the issue within the opinion poll community so it won’t just be the party officials who will be biting their finger nails on election night. In 2001 all the traditional pollsters wildly exaggerated the Labour lead and underestimated the…
However bad things might sometimes appear Labour is going into the next election knowing that it’s almost a foregone conclusion that it will come out as top party. The way the Westminster seats are distributed makes Michael Howard’s task of winning most seats, let alone getting a majority, almost impossible. A top Cambridge and now City mathematician, Martin Baxter, has created his own model of the UK scene together with an incredibly useful table called the “Battlemap” that illustrates very…
It’s starting to looking pretty black for Charles Kennedy. The Guardian, which has been the most supportive paper since he failed to turn up for the budget ten days ago, has now joined the media bandwagon with a huge feature today speculating on who will take over from him. But how will he actually go? I can’t see the LDs creating a situation like the one that saw the Tories boot out IDS last November. If he does go then…
The latest crop of polls in the US show Bush just ahead. But Kerry moves ahead if he chooses Edwards as his running mate. Not much movement since pre-Madrid. For a full round-up all major US polling information go to White House 2004 on this site’s links. This is going to be very tight and Kerry’s position is not helped by Ralph Nader who could pick up 2-3% of vital votes. I backed the Democrats at 3.05 on Betfair in…
PoliticalBetting.Com was established by Mike Smithson to provide a discussion platform and an information service for political gamblers and others keenly interested in the electoral processes and forecasting outcomes. For 13 years Mike was a journalist with BBC News and was part of the team in the mid-1970s that handled the first Broadcasting of Parliament experiment. This was followed by regular stints at Westminster. In 1977 he ousted Denis McShane, the current Foreign Office Minister, as the National Executive member…
Those supporting the “Ken is a certainty” position are looking at this as though it was a General Election where image and how things appear in the media are the critical factors. I’m looking at it as a local election where there’s a totally different dynamic. One almost unknown aspect the UK election process is that after each election the authorities are required to make available a copy of the electoral register showing those people who actually voted. The party…
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