Increasingly over the past week or so it has been the Mail that appears to have the most negative coverage of Mr. Johnson. Above is the latest for tomorrow’s paper. Of all the papers the Mail is probably the most significant and this run of bad front pages comes in the final build up to next week’s set of elections. The bodies piled high remark was first widely publicised by the Mail.
Over the past three days three separate national polls have been published. All of them show the Tory lead less than the general election but that is about as far as it goes. YouGov and Opinium are both online while Ipsos is carried out by phone. All three pollsters are very well established in the UK with records going back over several elections and each of them have regular media partners. Make of this what you wish. The outcomes if…
One of the reasons why Opinium is my favourite poster is because of the extensive way the firm presents its data and allows you to look at responses to one question and how it affected other responses. Last week’s big news was about the super league leading to Opinium including questions about this in its latest poll including one that tested the sample’s interest in football. So because of the extensiveness of the dataset, we can do comparisons on the…
GE2015 showed that betting based on single seat polls is a recipe to lose money At the end of last week I drove through the Hartlepool constituency on the way back home from my holiday in North Northumberland in the hope of seeing something that I could snap to illustrate the by-election. Alas nothing was obvious on the A19 but maybe I was concentrating on the traffic! Like David Herdson on Saturday I am far from convinced that the Tories…
Harold Wilson said in 1964, “The Labour party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.” By 2015 the focus was rather on what was moral about a crusade: which in many ways epitomises Labour’s problems all too neatly. In a recent thread, it was suggested that Labour needed some policies to attract attention and get voters motivated once again. My response was a Workers Charter. I suggested the following policies. Guaranteed minimum hours in every contract of employment. A…
In spite of it all Opinium has the CON lead up 2 to 11% The most striking question in tonight’s Opinium poll for the Observer is the one above testing on how many perceive Johnson to be corrupt following the events of recent weeks. It really says something about things at the moment that such a question is included in a major poll. I am sure that this sort of polling question has been asked before but I cannot recall…
History suggests it is very hard for governments to gain by-elections Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer were both campaigning in Hartlepool yesterday. That may be because they both believe the by-election there to be very close or it may be that they wish to give that impression. It really shouldn’t be close. Governments hardly ever gain by-elections from the main opposition and when they do, there are usually exceptional circumstances. Tony Blair, despite his extraordinary poll leads through most of…
Correlation does equal causation? I’m fascinated by this analysis, perhaps American pollsters should change their weightings and ditch weighting polls by age and educational attainment and use things like (poor) health condition and alcohol use. With the structure of the American health system poorer people cannot get the heath coverage and assistance they need perhaps this is why the GOP tried to gut and sabotage the Affordable Care Act? It was an attempt to beget more GOP voters. This is…