politicalbetting.com

Will his 9/11 families strategy rebound?

If you look at the betting on who will get the Republican nomination for the 2008 White House race there is only one person in it - the Vietnam veteran and Senator from Arizona, John McCain. His price is now at 1.36/1 and is way ahead of the second favourite, the ex-Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani.

Yet if you check the latest polls a different picture emerges - Giuliani has significant leads over McCain.

So why are punters not following the pollsters and is there value to be had on the man who made his name in the immediate aftermath of 9/11?

Some of the doubts might be being fuelled by stories like the one above in the New York Post this week. Yes - Rudy’s great period was in those harrowing days after 9/11 when his calm leadership in New York won him plaudits at home and abroad.

But being seen to exploit the families for his nomination bid has to be handled with extreme care and this story has sent reverberations across the nation. Will this rebound on him?

Mike Smithson

But why no voting intention figures?

The December poll from Communicate Research is out this morning in the Independent but the online edition, at least, does not appear to feature voting intention figures. These were clearly asked because breakdowns of how supporters of different parties answered some of the questions are included in the story. Maybe that detail will come tomorrow.

Andrew Grice, the paper’s political editor, puts the focus on the “who would make the best PM” question where Brown was rated at 39% while Cameron scored 36%. Lib Dems divided by 37-31% on this question while those saying they intended to vote Green went for Cameron by 40-30%.

But is Grice correct to state in his introduction that that the answer to the “best PM” question means that people “prefer” the Chancellor as their next PM? That question was not asked. Alastair Campbell could rate Manchester United as the “best football team” but still say he prefers Burnley.

The finding on “best PM” is consistent with other surveys. YouGov last week reported a 28-27 Cameron-Brown split on the issue while ICM had Brown had Brown 5% ahead on the same question at the end of November.

Clearly this is an area where the Chancellor is seen positively - the challenge for Labour is to convert that into a desire to vote for the party. For the former poll had voters wanting a Cameron-led Tory Government over a Brown-led Labour by a 13 point margin while the latter reported a 9% overall Tory lead.

The poll also found that two thirds of people think Gordon “grumpy”, against only 18 per cent who think the same of the Tory leader.

As we discussed in November CR does not use past vote weighting to ensure a politically balnced sample and their methodology is “currently under review”.

Hopefully we will be able to get the voting intention figures either tomorrow or when CR publishes the detailed data.

Mike Smithson

How September’s 125/1 shot is making the running

The long holiday weekend and for all but one of the declared candidates in Labour’s deputy race a chance to relax with their families or to get away from the political process.

For John Cruddas, however, this was the ideal time to maximise the headlines on what is always a very slow news period. So his warning about Labour’s membership declining at 27,000 a year made it onto most of the bulletins yesterdays and commands a fair amount of space in today’s papers.

His message that Labour has to be rebuilt from the grassroots in order to reconnect with the electorate seems ideally honed to resonate with those who are still members of the party and will account for a third of the total votes in the electoral college.

It also reinforces his core proposition that his bid is very different from the cabinet ministers whose main concern can be portrayed as jockeying for position in a Brown-led government.

What must have been very satisfying for him yesterday was getting the party chair, Hazel Blears, to respond by saying he was using the membership data in a “sensational way”. It just sounded pathetic and underlined the argument that Cruddas has been making.

My reading of what is happening is that the membership will just about put up with a Brown coronation but they want their chance to vote THEIR man into the deputy slot - a view that is echoed amongst many leading trade union figures.

In the betting my only regret was not getting on at the 125/1 on him that was available just before the Labour conference.

Mike Smithson

PBC’s first ever poster and David R get the prizes

The first person ever to post a comment on PBC, Tim Hill (AKA Big Tall Tim) and David R are the winners of our two outstanding competitions - on the US Mid Terms and the “2006 Prediction Contest“. Tim, whose first post from March 29th 2004 is reproduced above, is a close friend and is a former PPC and Councillor for the Lib Dems in Bedfordshire.

These were the top results:-
Big Tall Tim
Barnesian
peter the punter
rej4sl
Liberal Neil
Arb Seeker
Alex
Mark Senior
fitaloon
Vino
JulianH

Tim won on the tie-breaker on Joe Lieberman’s performance. We done to everybody. A full list of how everybody did is available to download here - Mid-Terms Competition1.xls

The top entries in the “Predicting 2006 Contest” are:-
1 David R 533
2 Stephen Thomas 531
3 Max 525
4 Chris Took 523
5 Russell 522
6 Anatole 511
7 Norfolk Yokel 504
8 aschamberlain 502
9 Hagmark 486
10 Julian H 485

A full list of entries and scores is available to download here - Pb.com 2006 competition1.xls

The winners get a copy of my book on politics and betting that is due to be published during 2007. Thanks to Paul Maggs who, yet again, has done a brilliant job managing the entries and producing the result spreadsheets.

Tomorrow I am going away for a few days and have prepared four articles linked to the 2007 Prediction Competition which will be posted on New Year’s Eve. The plan is that these will provoke discussion ahead of the entry thread next Sunday. Part 1 tomorrow is on the “Lib Dems in 2007.

Mike Smithson

Happy Christmas to everybody?

A new report from Alexa, the Amazon off-shoot that monitors internet traffic world-wide, places Politicalbetting.com as the sixth most visited news and media politics site in the UK ahead of even the sites of those well established political journals the New Statesman and the Spectator.

YouGov is up there at number two because of all the traffic generated by its online polling. In the past week users filling in surveys have given it a page view rating of 30 as those surveyed have gone from one question to another.

That there are three blogs in the top six shows starkly how the political media is changing. Thus Guido is in fourth place with Tim Worstall site rated at number five.

This is the table as it appears on Alexa.

Alexa also publish a list of the most popular UK political blogs where PBC is in third position. Surprisingly ConservativeHome does not make the top 10 although Anthony Wells and his UK Polling Report site is in fourth place.

One factor that helps flatter PBC is that many visitors come back to the site time and again during an ordinary day. Alexa, unlike some other web usage trackers, does includes an element for page views in its calculations. Thus over the past week visitors have carried out more than 20 page views a day compared with 1.3 for Guido.

Mike Smithson

Ming’s party at lowest point since the Mark Oaten revelations

A new YouGov poll in the Sunday Times this morning has the Lib Dems down at their lowest point with the internet pollster since the Mark Oaten crisis during the leadership contest earlier in the year. The shares are compared with the Telegraph YouGov poll reported on Friday are - CON 37% (nc): LAB 32% (-1): LD 15% (-2).

This decline is in line with the trend from other polls. Earlier in the week the pollster which has been showing the best Lib Dems ratings, ICM, had the party down 2% at 18% and Mori was reporting a similar 2 point fall off in support.

This comes at a time when Labour has come under serious pressure following the loans probe and the Saudi arms case issue.

The Sunday Times runs the YouGov story under the headline “Women Flock to Cameron” and focuses on the differential male-female support that we have reported on here before. It notes that the Tories have an 8% lead amongst women but only a 1% lead amongst men.

This cuts both ways. With these same figures the paper could easily have put the focus on the apparent failure of the Tories to increase support from men

Also the Sunday Times chooses to compare Labour’s 32% share in today’s survey with the first YouGov poll of 2006 when Blair-Brown’s party was on 40%. That’s an unfair comparison because that poll was taken just after the Mark Oaten case when the Lib Dems had slipped to 13%.

Mike Smithson