politicalbetting.com

Populus poll means - “Lib Dems four seats off being official opposition: Labour losing majority”

Apart from a marking down of the Lib Dems the betting markets have hardly reacted to yesterday’s sensational Populus poll in the News of the World which when translated into seats means that Labour would not have an overall majority in the House of Commons and the Lib Dems would be just four seats short of being the official opposition. The figures with changes on the last Populus poll three weeks ago are:-

LAB 30 (-3): CON 28 (-1): LIBD 28 (+4)

Putting these figures into Martin Baxter’s election predictor we get the following Westminster seat distribution based on applying the partys’ poll shares on a uniform national swing:-

LAB 323 seats : CON 147 seats : LIBD 144 seats: OTH 32 seats

The poll reinforces recent Politicalbetting.com calls on the number of Lib Dem and Labour seats and opens up the unprecedented prospect of a three-way fight.

But before we get too carried away we need to see other similar trends from other pollsters. The next, is likely on Friday from YouGov - the internet pollster which has in recent months shown the Lib Dems to be on lower levels than the other firms.

If the Lib Dems can sustain this and go into the election campaign almost level pegging it takes away the big argument that they always find (see picture above) - that a vote for them is a wasted vote and could pick up large number of ex-Labour voters disillusioned over the war and other measures. In that situation anything could be possible.

For there’s been a seismic change in the Lib Dem poll position in relation to Labour compared with this stage last time. In the final half of 2000 Mori had the party at an average of 38% behind Labour while the figure for ICM was 30%.

While all the focus has been on the Tories inability to capitalise on the Government’s difficulties support for the Lib Dems has been surging and it does not take much of a shift for whole new scenarios to be created.

OUR MAIN CALLS

If we all thought the same there’d be no political betting!

Yesterday’s SELL CALL on Labour at 346 seats in the spread markets has created a good debate and opened up a split between those who think that in spite of their current performance Labour are going to do just fine in the General Election and those who think they’ll have a struggle. Nobody, though, has been bold enough to put the argument that the Tories will end up winners!

The Labour big majority backers ought to look at Labour’s position now and compare it with where they were before the 2001 General Elections.

Whatever it’s fun to speculate and to discuss. We think that Labour will get a lot less seats than the current spread markets and we rather like the Bet365, link from here, of 2/1 on Labour at 335 or less. That seems great value and with less of the risk than a spread bet.

Keep on arguing. Keep on backing big Labour seat totals because it creates better betting value.

Image www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/images/argument.gif

scotlibdems

After our Lib Dem BUY CALL - now SELL LABOUR

Five weeks ago we advised that backing Charles Kennedy’s Lib Dems for 58 seats or more on the spread markets was a good value bet. Those who took the advice could now get out at a profit of four times their unit stake. But don’t - even with the buy price rising last night to 66 we believe that this is still value for money.

Now another big opportunity has emerged on the spread markets - SELLING LABOUR. In spite of the drubbing the party got in last week’s by-elections the spread price on Labour has surged to such a point where there’s now real value in selling at 346 seats.

With this type of bet you win your unit stake multiplied by the number of seats that Labour is short of 346. So if they got 316 and you had £10 a unit on your winnings would be £300. On the other hand if Labour got 366 you would lose twenty times your unit stake.

The latest prices for Labour on the spread-betting markets are over-valued and offer a good opportunity for punters wanting to bet against them. These are last night’s figures with comparisons from last week before the by-elections:-

LAB 346-354 (+14 ): CON 212-220 (-27): 62-66 (+6)

What’s not taken into account is the reduced sized House of Commons and the spreads seem to assume that the rise of the Lib Dems - up to 25% in this week’s ICM poll - will have almost no impact. The theory is that the party will just build up votes that it cannot convert into MPs. We disagree and our view of the outcome is based on the following factors:-

• Labour’s poll lead over the Lib Dems has collapsed by more than 25% compared with what it was at this stage before the last election. In July 2000 Mori had Labour at 49% to the Lib Dems 12%. At the election in 2001 Labour dropped 7% and the Lib Dems rose 7%. The idea that Labour will recover by the time of the General Election is not backed up by what’s happened before - in fact the reverse is true.
• Labour is certain to lose 10 seats in the Scottish boundary changes that reduce the total of MPs from 659 to 646. Why the spreads are continuing to accept bets without factoring this in is amazing. This factor alone is worth a SELL Labour bet.
• The Lib Dems will do far better than the national swings to win 20+ Labour seats. Being an incumbent Government and having to deal with the rising Lib Dems is a new experience for Labour, and so far they’ve shown themselves to be pretty inept.
• The anti-Tory tactical voting of the past two elections will be minimal. A main reason that Labour got its mammoth majority in 2001 was because mostly Lib dems switched in key seats to produce an estimated 30 extra Labour MPs. That’s not going to happen on anything like the same scale again, if at all, and we have calculated an unwind factor of 13 seats from Labour to the Tories.
• The emergence of anti-Labour tactical voting. This happened in Brent East, Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill and is likely to appear at the General Election, possibly causing the loss a critical seats.
• The pollsters will, as in every election from 1992 onwards, have a marked pro-Labour bias. The average has been 6.5% - we are working on 4%. There is no sign that this has changed and to compensate have cut 2% of the Labour figure in the “poll of polls” and added 2% to the Tories.

Applying these factors to Martin Baxter’s current “poll of polls” we get the following House of Commons:-

LAB 295: CON 237: LIBD 82: OTH 32

Thus our projection has Labour at 51 seats less than the current spread sell price. We think that this is a good value bet.

In the Commons the party Labour would be 28 seats short of an overall majority. The combined Lib Dem and Tory total of MPs would not be enough for a majority. Michael Howard’s Tories would, just, be the biggest party in England.

2 pm UPDATE - A by-election in the town that elected H’Angus the Monkey as mayor?
bbc

If Peter Mandelson is appointed an EU Commissioner this morning then there will be a by-election at his seat in Hartlepool. At the 2001 election this was the result:-

LAB 22,506 (59.15%): CON 7,935 (20.85%): LIB 5,717 (15.02%): OTH 1,893 (4.97%)

Hartlepool voters were last in the news two years ago when they rejected Labour and elected local football team mascot, Stuart Drummond, known as H’Angus the Monkey, to the post of Mayor after securing 60% of the vote.

NEW MARKET - MANDY TO BE A NON-STAYER FOR THE THIRD TIME?
Meanwhile, following his nomination by Tony Blair, bookmakers William Hill are offering odds of 3/1 that Peter Mandelson fails to see out his full term as Britain’s EU Commissioner. Surely this won’t happen a third time? This is a great bet for William Hill and a bad one for punters. You have no idea when you will get paid - it could go on for years - and meantime you are locking up your money with the bookmaker.

Populus sets out its case

Opinion polls are critical tools for political gamblers and in recent weeks we’ve made a number of observations about their accuracy. In particular we have looked at what happened at the Euro Elections last month when surveys by YouGov, in the Telegraph, and Populus, in the Times, could be compared with real results.

Two days before the Euro vote we noted that YouGov was putting its reputation on the line with its very high figure for UKIP and, indeed, this is what is has been attacked for.

But after the elections we also noted that the internet pollster got closest with the crucial Lab-Con split although both it and Populus both under-estimated the Tories and over-estimated Labour - something that most polls most of the time when tested seem to do. This tendency is something that gamblers should always be aware of and should always factor in.

This prompted the head of Populus, Andrew Cooper, to post this comment. We think that he makes important points that should be given greater prominence.

As a matter of actual fact the accepted measure of accuracy in the polling industry is the average error in the final poll published before an election. On this measure the Populus poll conducted nearly a week before polling day, was fractionally more accurate than YouGov’s poll conducted around the same time, with an average error of 2% compared with 2.2% for YouGov’s.

What is more YouGov’s exit poll - with a massive 7,000 sample of people supposedly being polled after they had voted, and therefore in theory much more accurate, had an average error of 2.8% (compared with a theoretical margin of error, given sample size, of 1.1% - which technically classifies it as a rogue poll). The YouGov exit poll predicted essentially a 3-way tie between Labour,Tories and UKIP.

Within all of these figures lies an immutable fact about polls, which you seem to have missed: they are blunt instruments; even the most methodologically robust poll cannot be more accurate than its standard deviation, which is a function of sampling. For most polls this means the figure for any party is accurate to within plus or minus 3%. So a poll putting Labour on, say, 32%, in fact means simply that there is a 95% probability that their support lies somewhere between 29% and 35%.

For this reason reading the leads between parties from polls is an even more treacherous business, since the margins of error on two figures are compounded: our last poll, for example, showed a Labour lead of 4% but in fact, when margins of error are taken into account, it meant that Labour’s lead is (at 95% confidence) somewhere between -2% and +10%.

Generally speaking the polling companies have done a pretty good job in as much as they’ve stayed within the margin of error most of the time. Populus did so again in the Euro elections; YouGov didn’t. Not only was its average error outside the defined margin of error, but it erred on its UKIP rating by a wide margin - an egregious mistake (presumably a result of the sampling problems associated with internet-only polling), compounded by the probability that UKIP would not have done even as well as they did by the end had not

YouGov not wrongly placed them at nearly 20% right at the beginning, which became the story of the campaign. Polls which make headlines, as that one did, have the capacity to become to a degree self-fulfilling: just one of the reasons why integrity of method is so important and why there is a drive now to improve the self-regulatory standards of the polling industry.

Incidentally, since you raise the point, Populus has only once shown a Tory lead - in May. ICM have shown the 2 main parties level-pegging several times. MORI have shown a Tory lead at least once (July 2003). And if you average each company’s polls (a sensible way to allow for the inevitable blips) you will find that, since last summer Populus has shown an average Labour lead of 2.9% compared with 3.9% for ICM, and 2.9% for MORI while YouGov has the Tories in the lead by an average of 2.4%.

The key driver of this variation is the fact that Populus, ICM and MORI all have the Tories averaging 32% over the last 18 months, while YouGov have them averaging 38%.

Your proclamation that Labour will win most seats at the next election but might not have an overall majority puts you way out on that limb with YouGov! All I can say is I’m very glad I don’t have any of my money riding on your prediction (or their’s)

We are grateful to Andrew for this but he has not touched on the major issue - why is it that almost without exception polls are biased to Labour? We have made critical comments in the past about other firms and none has responded. This is an important issue and the more we know the better.

We hope that at least one of the bookmakers will open a market at the General Election on which pollster will get closest

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Image http://www.aperfectworld.org/clipart/Metaphors/signonlineb.gif

Give a political bet as a present!

If you’ve been celebrating or commiserating after Thursday’s by-elections you might be interested in a new gambling service where you can give political bets as presents. It’s all done online and you can give one to yourself.

What’s promising is that the service, Flipem, does well thought out political bets and ran what we think was the only “size of majority” market on the Leicester South by-election, where we came across them. For a unit cost of £2 to you you could have given someone £12 if the Lib Dems had had a majority of 1-2,500.

They’ve now got a market on how many seats the Lib Dems will get at the General Election with some reasonable odds.

For 71-75 seats a £2 “gift” will produce £20 for the recipient of your choice if that’s what the party eventually gets. The 45 or less “price” is £32 for the £2 stake which might be popular amongst Labour or Tory supporters! No doubt other political markets will emerge and we will keep an eye on them.

General Election spread-betting gets cheaper. After last week it’s even more tricky to predict the number of seats that each party will get and punters seem to be keeping well away from the spread betting markets. These have now reduced their prices - the spread between “buy” and “sell” - in order to make themselves more attractive but, apart from the Lib Dems, we do not see any value.

The new reduced priced spread markets are:-

LAB 343-350 (+3) : CON 223-230 (-8) : LIBD 59-63 (+1)

The main General Election market move in the opposite direction. The Labour price went from 2/7 to 1/3 on William Hill and this is the current best value. These markets are about Who Wins Most Seats and not on who gets a majority and it’s very hard to see how there can be any other result than Labour coming out on top even if it suffers a huge drop in votes.

TONY BLAIR. He’s still there and while he wants to stay in the job we think that he will remain. Two markets - will he be there on election day and who will be the Labour leader?

There’s even now a market on him being Prime Minister longer than Mrs Thatcher. You can get l!1/2 that he won’t and 6/4 that he will. We wonder whether Gordon Brown has any money on? We do not like markets where you do not know when you will be paid and the prices are not good value.

WHITE HOUSE RACE
Just a week off the Democratic Convention in Boston when John Kerry will be selected, formally, as the party nominee for President in the election on November 2. For those with winning bets on Kerry for the nomination this should mean that we get paid out.

The frustrating thing about this market is that it was all resolved in early March yet we have had to wait for so long for the pay-out.

Next time the bookies should define getting the “nomination” when a candidate has secured enough delegates.

The polls have hardened on the Kerry-Edwards ticket and so have the betting prices. Bush, at 9/10, is at his weakest point ever. We stick with our BACK KERRY call.

Other markets have started to emerge including ones on who will win particular states. Included amongst them is Florida where there was all the fuss last time.

POLITICALBETTING.COM We will be away for a few days though reader comments, no doubt, will continue. Next post - Thursday July 24.

Image: http://www.sbac.edu/~tpl/clipart/Holidays/present%2002.jpg

What about a market on which party will win England?

Given the fact that the overall General Election markets are almost a foregone conclusion why not a market on which party will have most of England’s 529 MPs after the General Election?

A crumb of comfort for Michael Howard is that the Lib Dems’ ability to take votes and seats off Labour puts this goal within sight.

If the Lib Dems just do as well in the General Election as they did last time then the Tories need 244 seats to be top in England. This involves the Tories taking 80 seats from Labour which, as things stand at the moment, looks challenging given that they got just 164 English seats in 2001.

But for each Lib Dem success against Labour in England the Tory target is reduced and if, say, 20 seats went Charles Kennedy’s way, then this might be possible.

Last week’s by-elections showed that tactical voting against the Tories might not happen on anything like the same scale as the last two General Elections when it reduced Tory seats by 30-40 compared with the national swing. With this factor then Michael Howard probably starts with a base of about 200 seats - a long way off the 324 for an overall majority but not too far from being top party in England.

Aiming to be top party in England might resonate well with English voters. Issues like per capita public spending in Scotland being much higher than in England and Labour MPs from north of the border voting on issues like university fees would be much easier to exploit as top party. Also the Tories have almost nothing to lose, just one MP, in Scotland.

Whenever there’s a red hot favourite bookies sometimes look at a way to create a handicap market. Could Englaand seats only be the one for the General Election? We think so