politicalbetting.com

How can Cameron appeal to two audiences at the same time?

Whenever pollsters ask about the main issue that concerns voters then immigration invariably comes top of the list. In the latest Ipsos-Mori poll 41% of those interviewed said, unprompted, that “race relations/immigration/immigrants” was amongst their top concerns.

Politicians of all parties know this and are ultra-careful when they move into this policy area - but peddling what appears to be a highly populist anti-immigrant line can have its own dangers. - and the person facing the biggest challenge is David Cameron.

For the section of the electorate most likely to be sensitive by a tough anti-immigrant stance are Lib Dem supporters including many, now doubt, who have switched their allegiance to Cameron’s liberal conservatism since the general election.

Could straying into this territory, as the Tory leader did to today, be a turn-off to many of those whose support he has managed to win in the past two years?

All this allowed the Lib Dem home leadership contender and home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, to accuse Cameron of “pandering to the right wing in his own party and claims that immigration numbers should be cut without having the faintest clue as to how that would happen”.

Labour have to be very careful in this area too. The Michael Howard-style approach adopted by John Reid was doing the party no good amongst this key group of centre voters.

Mike Smithson

How should Labour respond to the Rifkind plan?

Reproduced above is part of the coverage that the Daily Mail is giving this morning to the plans that are emerging over what the Tories will do about Scottish devolution and the so called “West Lothian Question”.

Clearly the growing disparity between public services north and south of the border, which is being skilfully exploited by Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, is not going to go away. Free prescriptions, free home care for elderly and the absence of university tuition fees add up to an agenda that looks potentially problematical for Brown.

Labour’s current strategy of accusing the Tories “playing fast and loose” with the constitution, the words used by Cabinet Minister, Ruth Kelly yesterday, doesn’t quite resonate.

The problem for Brown is that if steps were taken to adjust the Barnett formula under which more public money is spent per head in Scotland than England there would be the danger of Labour seat losses to the SNP.

The normal Brown strategy for dealing with Tory plans that appear popular is to close them down like with the IHT proposals earlier in the month. There’s much less scope for that with Scotland.

So this is one that is going to run and run and there will be more Daily Mail headlines.

Mike Smithson

Australia Decides 2007 - Part 1

Since John Howard asked the Governor-General for an election on Saturday 24 November, we have seen the first two weeks of the 2007 Australian election campaign, and in short - Rudd is retaining his substantial lead in the polls, and he has been the net “winner” of the campaign to date.

Since the start of the 6 week campaign, John Howard and Kevin Rudd have released their tax policies (both proposing substantial cuts), and met for the first (and only) debate of the campaign. Most pundits gave the debate solidly and clearly to Rudd.

The result of this fortnight so far has seen a swing to Labor, rather than the commentariat’s expectation of a narrowing in the gap between the parties. The latest Newspoll has Labor on 58% of the two party-preferred (up 2), against the Liberal-National Coalition, on 42 (down 2). I recommend using Newspoll as the yardstick for measuring how the parties are performing nationally. Newspoll appears in Tuesday’s edition of the Australian (www.theaustralian.news.com.au), and is the pollster of choice for Australian politicos.

In recent threads, and via email, I have been asked by other PB-ers whether the mood for a change of government is as emphatic as the one in 1997 in Britain. My answer to that is “in some ways yes, and some ways, no”. The dividing line seems to partially be based on age, and to a lesser extent, on region.

Generation Y - the YouTube/Facebook generation - seems to have most heavily swung to Kevin Rudd and Labor. John Howard is the only Prime Minister most of them can remember and they seem to be very keen for a change. Some of the Murdoch state-based newspapers have quoted polling during the campaign suggesting that around 70% of 18-24 year olds are keen for a Rudd government. On the other hand, the swing among older generations is less pronounced.

From a betting perspective, the figures on Betfair say it all - the weight of the money is very much on Labor winning government. But go a little deeper and look at the seat-by-seat betting. The vast majority of money bet on individual seats is tied up in Bennelong (held by John Howard) and Wentworth (held by Environment Minister, lawyer in the “Spycatcher” case, and leading republican, Malcolm Turnbull). Both men are defending previously safe Liberal seats with now-narrow majorities that should fall if there is a uniform national swing that is sufficiently strong to deliver government to Labor. However, both men are favourites to hold their seats. What might this suggest?

Consider where the leaders have been campaigning in this week. For example, Kevin Rudd spent some time campaigning in Kew, a wealthy area in the safe Liberal seat of Kooyong in suburban Melbourne, the seat held by Sir Robert Menzies. While I don’t believe Labor will win Kooyong, it suggests to me that Labor’s polling shows big swings to the ALP in previously safe Liberal seats. The Liberals may well hold on to the odd marginal - particularly outside Sydney and Melbourne - but we may see some jaw-dropping results within the big cities on election night.

Towards the end of the campaign, I’ll write another piece on the campaign, and a guide on what to expect on election night if you are interested in following it on the web. In the meantime, feel free to leave questions and comments for me on this thread.

Alexander Drake is a former adviser to a cabinet minister in the Howard government

Could the “no” to the Trident replacement help him and his party?

After a period when the main complaint about the Lib Dem leadership race was that both contenders appeared the same the man who came second last time, Chris Huhne, has put a new issue on the table - should Britain spend the billions on replacing Trident and maintaining its independent nuclear deterrent?

In an interview with the Observer Huhne declared it would be ‘ridiculous’ to spend up to £15bn updating the UK’s ageing submarine-based nuclear arsenal. This was he said “a Cold War relic”

I think that this is a very significant move that should resonate well with largish sections of the party membership - which is probably a lot more left-wing than most of those who vote for the party in elections. Clegg, meanwhile, has suggested that he would strongly support the Trident replacement.

For more than half a century the issue of Britain’s independent nuclear capability has been a major fault-line in the nation’s politics and the need to replace the existing system means that it’s still there. If the left-winger John McDonnell had managed to find the nominations to challenge Brown for the Labour leadership then Trident would figured largely in that race.

Not replacing Trident and the total reliance on the US that it implies also fits well with the Lib Dems opposition to the Iraq War. A Lib Dem party following a Huhne policy could cause problems for Labour as it seeks to attract and retain those supporters who switched in 2005.

I’ve now got more than £100 on Huhne at average odds of 2.82/1. That seems the value bet.

Mike Smithson

Are we entering the era of Boat Race politics?

The massive monthly face-to-face survey by Ipsos-Mori is out in the Observer this morning and shows that Labour, on 41% have just pipped ahead of the Tories on 40%. The actual figures with comparisons on a telephone survey from a sample of half the size from the same pollster a fortnight ago are CON 40%(-1): LAB 41%(+3): LD 13%(+2).

Looking at today’s figures with the last directly comparable poll, Ipsos-Mori’s September face to face survey of nearly two thousand and we get a real sense of the magnitude of the political earthquake that we’ve experienced over the last few weeks. CON 40%(+9): LAB 41%(-3): LD 13%(-2).

The poll is actually quite old with the fieldwork taking place from October 18th to 23rd - so it started in the middle of the week before last.

The headline voting intention questions are based solely on those “certain to vote”. The findings from the other questions in the poll are based on all the responses - so include the views of a large number of people who have little or not intention of taking part in the democratic process. For this reason I tend to attach to them much less importance.

There has been a big change in the net satisfaction ratings of the two main leaders- something that we saw in Friday’s numbers from the YouGov panel. Brown has moved from plus 18% to minus 1% while Cameron has gone from -22% to minus 2%.

The paper describes the poll ushering in a “new era of ‘boat race’ politics in which Labour and the Tories are almost neck-and-neck.”

We’ll have to see what the October surveys for ComRes and ICM, where the fieldwork has been carried out this weekend, come up with. Unlike Ipsos-Mori both these pollsters apply weighting based on how respondents said they voted in 2005. This has the effect of depressing Labour levels because for some reason many more Labour supporters seem ready to answer the randomised unsolicited phone calls from polling firms than supporters of other parties.

Mike Smithson

What’s behind the Lib Dem price rally?

If you feed the latest figures from the main pollsters that have reported since the Tory conference into the Anthony Wells commons seat calculator the highest number that you get for the Lib Dems is 21 MPs from the Populus survey three weeks ago. The latest ICM poll makes it 18 seats with both YouGov and Ipsos-Mori showing a bare 11 seat total.

Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus site is even worse with his poll of polls producing precisely zero Lib Dem MPs after the next election on his seat calculator.

Yet just take a look at the overnight spreads from Sporting Index and Spreadfair reproduced above. The current LD buy levels are equal and in Spreadfair’s case, higher than what was available after the party’s conference in September when ICM was reporting a 19% share and Populus 17%.

This is not just affecting the Lib Dem spreads. The number of Tory seats being projected by the markets is now much lower than the seat predictors are suggesting.

Now the standard Lib Dem answer, which I buy into, is that the party incumbents have a very good record of holding on in spite of what national conditions might be like. Highly selective targeting of resources and activists tends to lead them to retaining seats that the national trends would suggest that they should lose. Also there is the tactical voting element. If Labour supporters want to impede the Tory resurgence in LD>CON marginals then there’s a strong incentive to switch.

It might be, also, that we’ll see Tory tactical voters in LD>LAB marginals like Manchester Withington.

But surely the punters risking big money on the spread markets don’t believe that Huhne or Clegg’s Lib Dems will finish up only being down 12 seats on their 2005 total?

With three polls due out in the next few days we might see a bit more movement. The spread that is under-valued here is the Tory one and a buy bet here might be the right thing to do.

Mike Smithson