politicalbetting.com – Page 518 – The web's premier resource for political betting.

Working out Covid-19 and the political classes

18/10/2020 Editor Comments 0 Comment

Let’s step outside the Westminster bubble. What is really exercising people just now? A good way of judging this is to look at what petitions are being put into Parliament. And indeed, one petition has caught on this week like wildfire, with 358,000 signatures at the time of writing (10am on Saturday), comfortably the petition with the most signatories. No, it’s not Marcus Rashford’s petition. It’s a politely-worded request to keep gyms open should Covid-19 cases spike. To set this in context, it has…

Read More Read More

The polling gets even better for Biden but Betfair punters remain cautious

17/10/2020 Mike Smithson Comments 0 Comment

One of the features of the current White House race is how the polling has got better and better for Joe Biden as time has gone on but the impact on the UK betting markets particularly Betfair, has not reflected this. Ladbrokes reported yesterday that two-thirds of all bets that taken on the election had been the Trump – my guess being that the smaller ones are going for the Republican but the bigger bets are for the Democrat. This…

Read More Read More

The great vacillator: Starmer needs to find some backbone

17/10/2020 David Herdson Comments 0 Comment

He appears far too scared of Tory criticism There has been a minor infectious outbreak in Westminster. Not Covid-19 in this instance, where recent case numbers remain much lower than in the Spring, despite Jacob Rees-Mogg’s efforts. No, in this case the infection is rebellion. On the Tory side, Chris Green – formerly PPS to the Leader of the Lords – quit over the government’s Covid-19 policy. Labour, by contrast, suffered a more substantial set of resignations, as two junior…

Read More Read More

Anatomy of an Error – Why forecasts missed the 2016 result

16/10/2020 Editor Comments 0 Comment

On election day 2016 the 538 forecast gave Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning. Of course, she did not. Forecasts now given Biden an even bigger advantage, but coverage of the race is haunted by the miss in 2016. It shouldn’t be. We know what went wrong in 2016, and we can see that Biden’s advantage is more resilient to the issue. The Midwest Mistake It is sometimes said that the polls were wrong in 2016, but it wasn’t…

Read More Read More

The WH2020 early voting trends suggest that we could see a record turnout

16/10/2020 Mike Smithson Comments 0 Comment

Is this good for Trump or Biden? Thanks to Michael McDonald who is collating all the published data on early voting and producing regular updates on his website which has enabled me to produce the chart above. Each state operates this differently so what’s available on the public record is not constant but we do have have from many states figures on the number of votes that have actually been cast by mail and at polling stations. We also have…

Read More Read More

Ipsos MORI Politics + Society podcast. Scotland: Yes is winning so what happens now?

15/10/2020 Editor Comments 0 Comment

On this week’s podcast, Keiran Pedley is joined by Ailsa Henderson from the University of Edinburgh and Emily Gray of Ipsos MORI Scotland to discuss this week’s bombshell Ipsos MORI / STV News poll showing support for Scottish independence at a record 58%. The group discuss what has caused support for independence to increase, the arguments Scots find convincing for independence and for Scotland staying in the Union and what might happen at the Scottish parliamentary elections next year. Listen…

Read More Read More

A mountain to climb – Labour’s challenge ahead of the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections

15/10/2020 Editor Comments 0 Comment

Rachel Ormston of Ipsos MORI Scotland and Ailsa Henderson from the University of Edinburgh look at the numbers. The story of Labour’s woes in Scotland is by now a familiar one. Having dominated elections in Scotland from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s, the notion that they would return only one Scottish MP was once inconceivable. Yet in 2015, that is exactly what happened – a fate that was to befall them again in 2019, when, following a very poor showing…

Read More Read More

The Pressure of the Populist Right

15/10/2020 Editor Comments 0 Comment

Oscar Wilde once claimed: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” My thread headers are, I must admit, less riveting than that. Still, they have their moments. Three years ago, I wrote about the UKIP leadership contest to replace Paul Nuttall. The candidates formed a crew that one is compelled to describe as motley. One candidate sought to mine the asteroids, while another was a survivalist who had once been shocked by a gay…

Read More Read More