politicalbetting.com

Has the Sun switched from MORI following the Mayoral outcome?

A key thing that polling does, apart from to give some idea about the outcome of a future general election, is to help create the environment in which the political process operates. As we have seen so often the pressure on party leaders can be driven by poor polling numbers.

For there’s little doubt that shocking polls for Labour, like the one in this morning’s Sun, can affect the whole way that contemporary politics is perceived and one set of bad numbers can lead to another.

But judging from the Sun’s report of its poll this morning it looks as though the top-selling tabloid newspaper might have switched to YouGov. The report notes that the paper “…chose YouGov after they accurately predicted the results of last week’s London Mayoral election.”

For the last couple of years or so the polls the paper has carried out, almost on a monthly basis, have been by MORI. Now if today’s development means that future Sun surveys will be by YouGov then there could be a pattern of at least three a month from the online pollster. YouGov, of course, already does regular surveys for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times.

I’m not sure whether this is a good thing - different approaches by different firms can give us a clearer picture and help us to understand better what is going on.

More YouGov polls could also affect the betting - particularly the spread markets on the number of seats that the main parties will get at the next general election. Market movements tend to be drive by the latest polling numbers and, not unexpectedly, the Tory spreads have moved upwards overnight.

The Conservative seat price on Spreadfair is now at 343-347 seats - the lower figure being the sell level and the higher one the buy level. Profits and losses in this form of betting are determined by working out the difference between the contract level and multiplying by your stake amount. So if you sold the Tories at 343 seats at £50 a seat and Cameron’s party ended with 373 seats then you would lose 30 times 50 = £1,500. On the other hand if they only got 323 seats you would win 20 times 50 = £1,000.

With this firm the prices are set by what other punters want to offer. The other spread firms fix the levels themselves and both of them have been down overnight. Expect a new price fix this morning.

Mike Smithson

Can it do for Stephan what 18 Doughty Street didn’t?

Stephan Shakespeare, the former campaign manager for Jeffrey Archer, who went on to found YouGov has a launched a new venture this week, PoliticsHome.com. It’s a website totally devoted to politics and brings together links, blogs, and videos in a form that, in Stephan’s words, will make it “the “Bloomberg of politics” covering political power as seriously as Bloomberg did financial clout.”

There’s a lot of money going into the site and a largish team has been recruited to provide the regularly updated content that such a venture needs. People will only visit if they think it is worth visiting and that means there has to be a reason to go there several times a day.

One feature is PHI - which I assume stands for Politics Home Index. The idea is that a panel of 100 “experts” are asked regularly for their views of political outcomes and these are featured in graphic form on the site. Thus PH 100 gives the panel’s views of the London Mayoral race and this is expressed in percentage terms.

The experts, though, are not risking any money on the race and just looking at it this morning, 24 hours after YouGov’s latest 13% lead for Boris, it appears slow to react. We find the trend is moving away from the Tory in spite of a big swing towards him in the betting. It looks interesting but I cannot quite see the point.

Live betting price charts, like those available on PB’s new betting section, would have been a whole lot better, more informative and not just for punters.

The site also needs to be 24/7 and that means a night shift. I was disappointed when I got up early this morning to do PB that Politics Home did not seem to have been updated. In the era of IPhones, Blackberries and smart PDAs, there’s a fair bit of traffic to be had out there before 7am and the site needs to be serving it.

Stephan’s last big venture was the 18 Doughty Street politics internet TV channel. It was a good idea but didn’t get the audience figures to sustain it. PoliticsHome does deserves to succeed - we need something in the UK akin to the excellent Real Clear Politics site in the US.

Mike Smithson

Was this behind the worst ICM ratings for three months?

This morning’s ICM poll in the Sunday Telegraph is good news for the Conservatives, good news for Labour but bad news for the Lib Dems. These are the shares with comparisons on the last ICM survey just a fortnight ago - CON 43%(+1): LAB 32%(+3): LD 18%(-3). The comparisons in the previous post were with the last ICM survey in the paper in early January.

The pollster’s methodology is usually the most friendly to the Lib Dems of all the firms and has been the only one to rate them at 20% or more since Clegg came in. Today’s 18% is a blow and is the first time since in early January that the party has slipped back into the teens.

Of course this might just be one survey and poll watchers will be looking carefully at the April Populus survey in the Times which should be out on Tuesday. Last time the firm had the Lib Dems on 19% - will that, like ICM show a drop?

For the real damage from the “no more than 30 partners” admission is that it shows Clegg to be naive and perhaps a bit too ready to talk about things that most people regard as being private.

The following was in the New Statesman last October, when Clegg was fighting for the leadership and features comment by the shadow minister for culture, Ed Vaizey after spending six gruelling days with Clegg trekking to the Arctic: “Nick’s a lovely guy but he’s terribly vain. For the entire trip he harped on about how he was number one in a Sky poll of ‘Most Fanciable MPs’ and that I was only number nine. We shared an igloo and the intimate, bonding evening chat was based on how good-looking he is. I was referred to only by my fanciability ranking of number nine“

My guess is that the interviewer, Piers Morgan, was aware of Nick’s readiness to talk about these areas when he led the questioning in this direction?

Mike Smithson

Is nationalisation really going to have no electoral impact?

Even though some are calling it “Labour’s Black Wednesday” there has been very little movement in the general election most seats betting following yesterday’s announcement by Alistair Darling that Northern Rock. The chart showing betting prices as implied probabilities has hardly changed on the past week.

It’s the same with the spread betting markets where punters buy and sell the number of seats the parties will get at the election as though they were stocks and shares. There was a minuscule move to the Tories yesterday but that was prompted more by the latest YouGov poll showing Labour 9% behind rather than Northern Rock.

It might be that political punters are mostly focussed on the US at the moment where there has continued to be a lot of betting activity on the Democratic party nomination. The problem for Brown-Darling is that there could be lots more bad news ahead.

Under the stark heading - “Absolutely, incredibly, utterly wrong!” Anatole Kaletsky argues in the Times that the “Northern Rock fiasco has just started, with the Government now officially in charge.”

The Guardian highlights possible political problems with the £165,000 a month money that is being paid to the two people who will now be running the back.

If ministers want cheering up then they ought to read Steve Richards in the Indy who reckons that the Tories are now “terrified” and “isolated” over the Rock. Below is an extract reproduced from the paper’s home-page. I’m not convinced.

Mike Smithson

Why can’t they focus on results and analysis not the spectacle?

Like many site visitors, no doubt, I have been spending at least one night a week during 2008 following the absorbing story of the race for the White House on the internet and on the US news channels that are available here.

And I have been mighty impressed by the latter which put the fare that the BBC and others produce in the UK to shame.

What the Americans have realised is that what matters with results programmes are the results and all the effort is put into gathering, presenting and analysing a mass of data in a form that is easy and gripping to follow.

There are no lofty hosts like the Dimblebys. there are few outside broadcasts except those following the key players, and the US news networks don’t seem to have those silly time-wasting three-party discussions where politicians try to score points off each other. The US coverage also avoids those irrelevant “How are they seeing it in the White Lion?” sequences which seem to be a speciality of the BBC.

It is as though the Corporation is not confident that it can explain the core story so it builds in a mass of odd items to try to “sex-up” the coverage. This simply does not work and means that the producers are often so tied up trying to figure out whether links to different locations are working that they are not following the narrative that is unfolding.

You try on election night to find the specific results you are interested in. In the old days they told us to check CEEFAX - now we get referred to the web-sites.

Please Mr BBC, ITN and Sky - can we have a US-style approach next time?

I should add that I spent more than a decade working as an editor with BBC national news and was involved in a number of election programmes. Those of us with a passion for politics were making the same points then.

Mike Smithson

Is winning a third term starting to look doubtful?

If you want proof that May’s fight for the London Mayoralty might not be the foregone conclusion that the betting markets currently suggest then do what I did last night - go to Google News and input the words “Ken Livingstone”.

The top few results are featured in the screen shot above - and just looking down the list you can see that he might be in some trouble. What’s particularly poignant is that the media references come from a much broader range of sources than just the Evening Standard with whom the Mayor has been involved in a long war of attrition.

Yesterday the normally Labour-friendly Observer ran a leader under the heading “Face your critics, Mr Livingstone”. It said: “He and his policy advisers have been accused of using taxpayers’ money to rubbish the mayor’s enemies; of failing to scrutinise the spending of hundreds of thousands of pounds of money earmarked for regeneration and of using City Hall staff and offices for political fundraising, a breach of electoral guidelines. The mayor’s response has been to issue denials and to claim he is the victim of a smear campaign. But this defence seems clumsy, given the evidence in the public domain that indicates a serious examination of many of the allegations is merited.”

Tonight there’s a Channel 4 programme in the Dispatches series which, amongst other things - “….accuses Mr Livingstone of “astonishing and shocking” drinking habits and being “a law unto himself”.

The electoral challenge he’s got is that even in Labour’s good times he has to rely for victory on supporters of other parties. Looking at how the capital voted in 2004 for the mayor and the London Authority it’s clear that one in four Lib Dems and one in six Tory supporters split their ticket in the Mayoral ballot. Will that happen to the same extent in May? I doubt it particularly as the manner in which he operates is becoming THE issue.

This will be the UK’s biggest political betting market of 2008 and last week I suggested that at the then nearly 2-1 that Boris Johnson was the value bet. If the media barrage does not stop then the next poll might have Livingstone behind. That’s what I’m betting on. I think that there’s an increasing chance that Ken won’t do it.

Mike Smithson