One of the more interesting bets that will see an outcome this month is the above from Smarkets on whether the Tories are are going to get a poll lead in March. I know a couple of PB Punters who have bet on the Tores doing and it has been fun to watch them as they see the possibility of another poll coming out and they can speculate whether this one will be the one. At the weekend their hopes…
This should be worrying for LAB At the weekend Opinium became the second pollster to report that Johnson had retaken the lead over Starmer on the best PM question. This was the first time this had happened since last November. What I would find troubling if I was a Labour strategist is in the chart above showing the regional splits. In Scotland and Wales Starmer just about always has the edge but it is what is happening in England where…
But could there be an earlier general election? My only worry about betting on a Johnson exit in 2024 or later is that he might just call a general election next year. This would make sense and fits with the pattern of previous PMs who did not have to operate within the confines of the Fixed Term Parliament Act. Getting rid of that legacy from the coalition is not far off and choosing the date would be entirely in Johnson’s…
TSE
This finding by YouGov about consumer confidence falling to an all time low in this near decade long series is quite illuminating. Consumer confidence is much lower now that any time since the start of the pandemic. Many of us have been saying for a while that the cost of living crisis, something that is going to get much worse, will be very damaging to Tories, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak in particular. YouGov note The cost of living crisis…
I recently looked at Labour/Lib Dem tactical voting since 1983 and noted that the analysis didn’t work quite so well for 1997. In 1997, the Lib Dems won 46 seats. This was up 26 on their total of 20 in 1992 and was achieved despite their share of the GB vote falling by 1.2 percentage points (pp). To what extent was this made possible by tactical voting? Boundary changes for the 1997 general election make this a little tricky to…
The story for the PM that won’t go away One of the must reads in the Sunday papers look set to be the above in the Sunday Times and raises huge questions over why Johnson overruled advisors and insisted that Lebedev be made a member of the House of Lords. Of course that was before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine which has has had a huge impact on East-West relations. This could be problematic for the PM with his party and…
Back in 2020 there was a lot of pre-election excitement about Texas flipping blue. But on election day and onwards the attention turned to events in Georgia. Democrats hadn’t come within 5% of winning the state since the Clinton era (won in ’92, just lost in ’96) but Democrats won it by the narrowest of margins. Then, after both senate seats went to run-offs, they flipped them both too. The reason was widely held to have been, in no small…