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Betfair Bush UPDATED - 0200 BST Friday

There’ve been big moves against George Bush on the Betfair betting exchange following revelations on ABC TV that one of its crews had filmed the missing explosives in Iraq nine days after the fall of the country. This starts.

The strongest evidence to date indicates that conventional explosives missing from Iraq’s Al-Qaqaa installation disappeared after the United States had taken control of Iraq.

Barrels inside the Al-Qaqaa facility appear on videotape shot by ABC television affiliate KSTP of St. Paul, Minn., which had a crew embedded with the 101st Airborne Division when it passed through Al-Qaqaa on April 18, 2003 — nine days after Baghdad fell.

At one stage the Bush price on Betfair reached evens but then it settled down a bit. Perhaps this is due to the lack of response on the US markets to the news.

It is not often that punters in the UK have been more reactive than those in the US.

More than $5m has now been matched on the White House race on the UK betting exchange Betfair. Add on the $8m that the conventional bookmakers are predicting and then factor in the spread betting markets and you get $15m - the UK’s biggest foreign political betting market ever. The interest has never been as great.

The ABC news story followed a day of stalemate. There’ve been new polls showing the same split view as of the past few days and on the betting markets the move to Kerry has held but little progress has been made.

For a good users guide to the pollsters check out this feature on Slate.

The latest polls are:-
Bush 46 Kerry 49 DCorps. Kerry +1
Bush 48 Kerry 46 Zogby daily tracking. Bush +1
Bush 47 Kerry 44 Tipp tracking Kerry +1
Bush 48 Kerry 49 ABC/WP . No change

Betting round up
Bush 53 Kerry 47 Iowa Political Futures Market
Bush 55 Kerry 45 Tradesports exchange
Bush 8/11 Kerry 6/5 UK best prices

With four full days to go we are sticking with the call on John Kerry that we made here on May 18. It is going to be tight and nothing is certain but all the signs are that those opposed to the President are motivated that bit more than those who want to give George Bush a second term.

Given the impact that the rise of UKIP has had on UK politics in the past six months any move or split within the party has to be taken seriously. With both Labour and the Tories polling in the 30s small shifts in support could have a huge impact on the General Election.

Yesterday’s ICM poll recorded support for UKIP up 1% at 4%. With its most public figure calling his party “barmy” then any reduction in the national support could benefit the Tories and also the Lib Dems which suffered from the UKIP surge in the Euro elections in the West Country.

There’s also the issue of Kilroy-Silk’s plan to stand for a Westminster seat at the General Election. Will he now be able to do this under the UKIP banner? If he can’t it will reduce drastically the media coverage that the party will command.

At the 2001 General Election UKIP recorded 1.5%. It is hard to see that rising much and this will benefit the Tories who before the UKIP May surge had started to build a recovery and were even talking of taking 42% of the vote in the Euro Elections . It will also help the Lib Dems to retain and perhaps add to their seat tally in Devon and Cornwall.

From the betting perspective it might be worth a UKIP sell on the spread markets. IG have them at 1-1.8 seats and it’s hard to see that they could make even one gain without Kilroy-Silk. SportingIndex have suspended their price on UKIP seats. If they come back on at one or more then it will look like a good bet.

The IG spread of 202-210 seats on the Tories starts to look good value for a buy.

This is reinforced by a new ICM feature. They now ask “Which of the folllowing best describes you - “I always vote in General Elections”; “I almost always vote…”; “I sometimes vote” etc. The “always” figure from Tory voters was 64% against 55% for Labour. To the “likely to vote on scale of 1 to 10″ question the Tories had the same proportion with the top score - 64% but Labour rose to 60%. The difference might be one of the explanations why polls mostly overstate Labour.

Full round-up of political markets.

Betfair George Bush - UPDATED 8am BST Thursday

With the two daily tracking polls showing further movement to Kerry there’s been a big push on the betting markets in his direction. The TIPP daily survey has moved from a 6% Bush lead to a 4% one while Zogby’s tracking number has moved from a 3% Bush lead to a margin of just one point.

The chart above shows how the £3m Betfair betting exchange market has moved and the trend is firmly in the challenger’s direction. It’s the same picture on the Iowa political futures exchange which now has it Kerry 46.3 to Bush 52.7 . On the Tradesports exchange it is Bush 53 Kerrry 47

The best UK prices are now 6/5 on Kerry and 4/6 on Bush.

The William Hill market on both men getting 269 electoral votes each has seen quite a lot of activity and the price has moved in from 20/1 to 16/1.

US ELECTION BET OF THE DAY
Back Kerry to win in Colorado. The latest poll has it 49-47 to the Democrat and you can get 9/4 on the Betfair exchange or 2/1 with a normal bookie.

We publish this article not because we think that it will happen but to demonstrate how with support for the two main parties in the 30s a totally different dynamic will apply at the next election and issues like polling accuracy and the tactical unwind will become even more critical. Last time Labour was so far ahead that inflated leads did not matter. Now they do.

Today’s ICM poll in the Guardian - LAB 37% CON 31% LIBD 23% - should make quite welcome reading for Tony Blair. But if it is as accurate as the final week survey that they did for the Evening Standard and published on the Tuesday before the 2001 General Election then on a uniform swing calculation Labour is 23 seats short of a majority.

CON 34.7% LAB 32% LIBD 22.8% ICM October poll with June 2001 “corrections”
LAB 301 CON 255 LIBD 59 seats Martin Baxter uniform national swing seat calculator
LAB 284 CON 289 LIBD 44 seats. Andy Cooke tactical unwind seat projection.

Of course we think the Cooke projection underestimates the Lib Dems and this analysis is grossly unfair to ICM. They did two polls in the final week in 2001 and the second one was more accurate - though it still under-stated the Tories and over-stated Labour. But the Standard survey had a much bigger sample and the interviewing started at the same time so should have been more accurate.

In the past five weeks the Labour’s poll share has been all over the place - down as low as 28% and as high as 39% - while the Lib Dem and Tory figures have been much more stable. Labour seems to do much better with ICM, the Lib Dems seem to get better ratings from Populus and YouGov tended to show higher Tory shares until UKIP emerged in the early summer.

What this mean is that risk-averse gamblers, particularly on the spread markets, should proceed with extreme caution. We believe that there will be money to be made because the pollsters are not infallible and that there will be an element of tactical unwind. There is no point in betting at the moment - only move if the spread prices move in a totally perverse way as they did after the July by-elections.

Sporting Index LAB 338-346: CON 202-210: LIBD 72-77 (No change)
IG Index: LAB 338-346: CON 208-216: LIBD 71-75 (No change)

We also believe that the Labour price of 1/6 to win most seats should be avoided. The party is highly likely to come out on top but the risks are greater than the returns at this price.

Three of the latest five national opinion polls on the White House race have Kerry in the lead according to the new round-up just out. The polls are:

Kerry 49 Bush 47 - DCorps
Kerry 46 Bush 49 - Zogby
Kerry 49 Bush 48 - ABC
Kerry 50 Bush 48 - Washington Post
Kerry 43 Bush 49 - TIPP

The latest electoral vote calculations based on state polls have it Kerry 247 to Bush 286. The Slate.com score-chart has it Bush 276 Kerry 262. Almost all of the surveys involved took place earlier than the national polls.

Betting has also been heavy for Kerry on the US focused betting exchange, Tradesports, where it’s now Bush 55.5 - Kerry 44.5. More money has been going on there being a prolonged legal wrangle before the result is known. It’s now about 7/2 compared with 4/1 three days ago.

The best UK prices are 13/10 on Kerry and 4/6 on Bush.

With three new national polls puting Bush aread, two giving it to Kerry, and one recording a tie the race for the White House is on a knife-edge. The big problem for the Democrats is that one of the polls has an 8% Bush lead while another has it at 5%. The two polls showing Kerry ahead put the margin at 1%.

There’s no doubt that Bill Clinton’s entry into the campaign has been a boost for Kerry and this is reflected in the betting prices. The best UK odds are now down to 13/10 on Kerry. A decline for Kerry on the Iowa “political futures exchange” has been arrested by the news.

The Tradesports betting exchange has moved sharply to Kerry with the challenger 43.5 to Bush’s 56.5.

The electoral vote calculations are swinging to and fro between the two contestants. Both Slate and Electoral-Vote now have the president just ahead.

We are sticking by our call of last week that any price above 11/10 on Kerry is good value.

For the candidates the stakes could not be higher and in all, both campaigns are spending nearly $40 million on TV ads in the final week of the campaign. This comes on top of the $15om that has already been spent. What’s been fascinating is how each swing state’s electoral arranemgents has come under the microscope. This is from Slate on Iowa.

Perhaps the most unusual electoral feature of Iowa is how absurdly easy it is to cast a ballot here. Want to vote absentee? No problem. Can’t wait for Election Day? Early satellite voting stations have been open since Sept. 23. Can’t be bothered to drop your postage-paid absentee ballot in the mailbox? They’ve got that covered, too. The parties will send state-licensed “couriers” to your living room to pick up the ballot and take it to the county auditor’s office for you.

With all these options, Iowans vote early in large numbers. This year, as many as 35 percent may cast their ballots before Nov. 2. And that can make a huge difference. In 2000, George Bush won the votes actually cast on Election Day. But when the early ballots were added in, Al Gore narrowly took the state. (He won by a little over 4,000 votes, but both campaigns this year motivate their troops by putting it another way: Gore prevailed by just two votes per precinct.) Voting may be a little too easy in Iowa. It takes just a few hundred signatures to force your county to open an early voting station (for what’s oxymoronically called “absentee voting in person”) at your preferred location. These have included churches on Sundays and now union halls, meaning these groups can preach “non-partisanly” to the converted and then show them to the polling booths.

But it’s the courier system that seems most amazing, and potentially alarming, to a jaded outsider. I tagged along with Ann Sokolowski, a volunteer courier for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Des Moines, as she drove around collecting absentee ballots from fellow Democrats. We were welcomed into the kitchen of Ed and Rosa Walker, an older couple who can’t make it to the polls because of health problems. They happily chattered about why they were voting for Kerry, and then handed over their absentee ballots to Sokolowski. She carefully avoided giving them any voting advice, which would be against the law. Then she plopped the ballots in a plastic shopping bag and we moved on.

With only six days remaining £2.9m has been matched on the UK-based Betfair betting exchange. Add this to the conventional bookmakers and the spread betting firms and we estimate that something like £10m will be wagered in the country on this single contest.