politicalbetting.com

Slightly better news for Michael Howard

After the NOP and ICM polls showing Labour leads of 8-9% this month’s YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph has the margin dropping to just 3%. The figures are:-

LAB 35% (-1): CON 32% (n/c): LD 23% (+1): UKIP 5% (n/c)

Compared with the YouGov poll at the start of October the Labour lead has been halved. Today’s poll is also good news for the Lib Dems with it returning to its highest share of the year from the pollster.

YouGov’s methodology tends to produce a more stable share for Labour than the other pollsters and during the whole of 2004 has not moved out of the 34-36% range. Today’s figure is not even at the top of that range. When tested against real results the pollster has proved to be more accurate with the Tory-Labour share than other pollsters although it still over-stated Labour and understated the Tories.

The move reinforces what we’ve been saying about when in the the month to bet on the General Election. Those polls that report at the turn of the month - YouGov and Populus - generally show smaller Labour shares than those that come out mid-month.

If you want to bet on Labour or against the Tories do it after the markets have digested the latest information. If you want to bet against Labour or for the Tories do it after ICM.

Today’s poll shows the impact that UKIP continues to have on the Tories and this is where, we believe the election will be decided. If UKIP remains at 4-5% then the Tories will continue to struggle and Labour will win a substantial majority.

If Michael Howard and his Austrailian Campaign Director, Lynton Crosby, can find a way of dealing with the UKIP issue then the outcome will be much closer. They might take some comfort in the fact that YouGov, when tested, does over-state UKIP significantly.

Full round-up of General Election and other political bets - click here.

.

For sometime now we’ve been meaning to draw users attention to the extraordinary internet book by the polling blogger, operator of UK Pollingreport and regular contributor to Politicalbetting, Anthony Wells.

It’s called “What if Gordon Banks had played” and is a fun-packed counterfactual political history of the 1970s based on the premise that Banks played in the quarter-final of the 1970 World Cup three days before the General Election that ended Harold Wilson’s Government and saw Edward Heath’s Tories win the election. Would Labour have held on if England had won?

If you’ve got a couple of hours to spare this is well worth reading.

What’s this got to do with political betting you might ask? Well it shows how little it takes to turn an entire election and it’s a reminder that elections are not always foregone conclusions.

Latest Labour seat prices:-
360 + 11/10
0 - 335 7/4
352 - 359 11/2
344 - 351 6/1
336 - 343 7/1

Try this little test. Click on this link to go Upmystreet.com. Type in the postcode of a UK residential address that you want to check. Then click on the link marked ACORN PROFILE and go to “full profile” . You will then see an interesting description of how the marketing business assesses people who live there, how much they earn, what TV they watch, the things they buy and what papers they read etc.

Now ask yourself whether the profile is a fairly accurate reflection of people you know with that post-code?

It’s a system like this, but obviously more comprehensive than what’s available free on the net, that is at the heart of the Tory “Voter Vault” of which a lot has been written in recent weeks. Party campaigners are said to be using it to identify the characteristics of potential Tory voters in marginal seats so they can find specific individuals to target at the General election.

A similar databank used by the Republicans was said to have been at the heart of their campaigns in swing states like Ohio. Apparently the car you drive is a dead giveaway and Volvo drivers were almost certainly going for Kerry. In the UK Labour have their own data profiling system available.

What the Tories are hoping is that their system will allow them to identify and then focus fully on that select group of voters that really matter - those who might switch to the party in marginal seats. There’s no doubt that the data profiling techniques enshrined within Voter Vault do help commercial companies find new customers. But is this approach going to produce more seats for the Tories at the General Election?

Everything depends not on the information itself but on how it’s used. Can they develop communication strategies that will cause people to switch?

You can see the data being used to generate bespoke letters and leaflets and they might develop a specific telephone script to deal with different groups. They are setting up a telephone campaign centre to use the information which will be focused entirely on marginal seats - many of which are in the Midlands.

Will it work? It might - but don’t hold your breath.

Latest Tory seats prices:-
0 - 220 10/11
245 + 12/5
221 - 228 5/1
229 - 236 6/1
237 - 244 15/2

After three polls showing big Labour leads the betting markets have now caught up a little with the number of predicted Labour seats at the election increasing and the Tory numbers declining.

At IG the spreads are LAB 345-353: CON 194-202: LD 70-74. Sportingindex, meanwhile have LAB 344-352: CON 202-210: LD 70-74.. These are big differences between the two firms with IG attracting more Labour money and SI, seemingly, getting more pro-Tory bets.

What could affect the prices is the timing of the polls. The November YouGov survey is due out in the next few days and Populus should be reporting its December figures a week or so afterwards. What is significant is that these two pollsters are likely to show a smaller Labour position than those that report in the middle of the month - ICM, NOP and Communicate - and we expect a small Tory price recovery.

In spite of the price movements both main spread markets still have Labour totals below the 346-354 that they were on at the end of July.

For those not used to this sort of betting think of the spreads as a share price. If you think Labour will do better than the 352 seats that SI is quoting then you BUY at, say, £10 a seat. If they ended up with 372 seats your winnings would be twenty times your stake. If Labour got 325 seats then your losses would be 352-325=27 times your £10 stake - £270.

Our current CALL is don’t bet. The polls are all over the places; there are doubts about whether the votes/seat equation will work as it did last time and Labour’s margin is only just larger than the 6.6% average overstatement of 2001.

For the LDs our call is stay out as well. On June 16 2004 our CALL was BUY the Lib Dems when the spread was 54-58. On October 5 2004 we said SELL when the spread was 72-77 and take what for many was a very considerable profit. That was the highest price the LDs reached and our sell call was at the top of the market.

Tory backers should keep well away. There’s been no glimmer of good news in weeks and the sentiment is very much against them. If the polls and Baxter seat predictor are correct then a seat total of 160-170 seats might be the result. Wait until we get closer to the election when some value bets and better information might emerge.

Other political betting markets - click here.

Be wary of the party spinners

As we get nearer the General Election pundits and punters will be looking beyond the opinion polls to find pointers as to what is going on.

One source that’s readily available are the results from the handful of local council by-elections that take place up and down the country almost every Thursday. For many years the results were aggregated and issued monthly as a sort of poll.

These are real electors putting real votes in real ballot boxes and so, the argument goes, they are as good, if not better, a test of public opinion than the polls which only survey 1,000 to 2,000 people.

But be careful of all the party machines which seek to reinforce the morale of activists by selecting specific results and then extrapolating national trends.

We wondered whether the head of Populus, Andrew Cooper, might have been on the receiving end of such “spin” when he made this observation on the site yesterday “..local by-election results as well as national polls seem to suggest that Labour’s vote is hardening: if you average recent local by-elections in which all 3 main parties stood Labour lead by about 5% over the Tories, which wasn’t true at this point in the last Parliament.”

We follow the by-election results closely and could not work out where Andrew was getting his information from. If Labour was doing so well, the predictable response came, how come that it’s been the Tories and to a lesser extent the LDs who have been winning seats?

The Tory activist and regular contributor to the site, Sean Fear, then produced the following analysis of 24 wards where all three parties have stood since the start of October, and also stood in the previous election.

The big problem is that there are so few seats that fit the bill and it is hard to draw conclusions. Council by-elections usually have very low-turnouts and are probably a better indicator of the strength and morale of local party machines than they are of public opinion.

In the year before the last General Election, it was possibly to look at the local by-election results and mistakenly conclude that the Tories and Lib Dems were doing much better than they did in the General Election.

So far in 2004 the Tories have net gains of 15, the LD s have net gains of 4, and Labour is down 14 seats. We think this is pretty meaningless and we should be wary of those who seek to extrapolate large conclusions that they say apply to the nation as a whole.

General Election seat markets:- Total Labour seats , Total Conservative seats , Total Lib Dem Seats.

Mike Smithson

Are gamblers ignoring massive betting value?

The spate of polls showing Labour shares in the late 30s with leads of upto 9% has, as expected, led to prices moving on the spread betting markets where punters gamble on how many seats each party will get at the General Election. SportingIndex have now shaved more off the Tories and increased Labour:- LAB 344-352 (+2): CON 202-210 (-2): LD 70-74 (n/c).

Yet the prices are not back to the levels of late July when Labour was level-pegging with the Tories in the polls and the spread markets had the party on 346-354 seats.

So a 1% Labour lead has become 9% but the spread is LOWER!

If you put the November ICM poll figures with the 8% Labour lead into Martin Baxter’s seat calculator you get LAB 398: CON 157: LD 62. - a Labour majority of 148. Putting in this week’s NOP 9% lead and Labour get to 400 seats again with a majority of 154.

On the face of it there is massive betting value out there that punters are simply ignoring. What’s going on? Why were they rushing to back Labour in July at 346-354 when there was 1% lead but not now the poll margin is so much bigger? And why, too, has the price on Labour getting 360+ seats MOVED OUT to 5/4? We put this down to three factors:-

We think the punters are right to be wary. The coming General Election is extraordinarily hard to call. There’s a lack of trust in Tony Blair’s Government; the Tories are not seen as being credible and the LDs have still to climb out of the “wasted vote syndrome”.

Keep your money in your wallet until things become clearer.

Round-up of General Election and other political betting odds.

SITE ENHANCEMENTS We’ve introduced a new element on the top right hand of the page showing the latest comments - just click to go straight there. This will allow users to see immediatly if there have been new comments since their last visit and will give prominence to new contributions to older discussions. It also lets me know if there has been a spam attack. Thanks to my son Robert for programming this.

To make space for this and make the right column less cluttered we’ve tidied up our links section. Out go obvious links to the BBC and CNN etc - we assume most users have these on their favourites. The individual links to the polling firms have now been scrapped in place of “Latest Polls” and to Anthony Wells’s great new site “UK Polling Report”. We’ve kept the links to the individual pollsters’ historic UK polling data.