politicalbetting.com

Edward Timpson - Conservative - 796 views

Elizabeth Shenton - Liberal Democrat 469 views

Tamsin Dunwoody - Labour - 181 views

Where candidates have more than one video on YouTube I have taken the one with the most views.

Mike Smithson

Mail on Sunday

My assessment: the Tories have a 90% chance of winning

We’ve now got more information about the Mail on Sunday’s ICM poll on the Crewe and Nantwich by election and it’s clear that the situation is even worse for Labour than was being reported last night. The panel above is reproduced from the paper.

For the Tory by election poll margin of 4% would have been 12% but for ICM’s “sprial of silence” adjustment. This is a standard procedure and involves allocating to Labour half the votes of those party supporters from the last general election who now say they they will turnout but “don’t know” yet what they will do.

I cannot recall a survey in the past when this adjuster has produced changes on this scale - normally it affects the shares by a maximum of 1-2%.

My guess is that the final votes on May 22nd will be much closer to ICM’s 16% Tory lead on general election voting intention than the reported figure of 4% for the by election. Based on these figures my view is that Cameron’s Conservatives have at least a 90% chance of taking the seat.

In many ways the Crewe and Nantwich general election voting figure is more dramatic than YouGov’s national 26% Tory lead that was reported on Friday. For C&N is constituency number 165 on the Tory target list and if a 16% lead actually occurred here then Cameron would win the general election with a massive land-slide.

Another survey in the Observer also suggests that there has been a sea-change in opinion. The paper notes that “a Tory government is preferred to a Labour one by a margin of 50 to 32 per cent. In another significant boost for Cameron, more voters think the Conservatives would do a better job of governing than believe they would do a worse job”

It’s not clear from the online edition of the paper who carried out the survey and whether or not the pollster is a member of the British Polling Council.

The latest Crewe and Nantwich betting prices have the Tories at 0.4/1 with Betfair and 4/11 with the traditional bookmakers. It looks good to me.

Mike Smithson

Are Labour’s chances as bad as the media is suggesting?

This weekend hundreds and maybe thousands of activists from the main parties will be heading to Crewe and Nantwich for a big couple of days of campaigning ahead of the critical by election a week on Thursday.

The weather’s good, the constituency’s road and rail links are excellent and, most of all, Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems have each got something to prove in this key test of public opinion during a very difficult time for the government.

Already several of those who have been flocking to the south Cheshire towns have been giving us their impressions on the PB comments threads. If you are amongst the campaigners please let us know so we can build up a picture of what is happening on the ground.

On the face of it this should be an easy one for Cameron’s Conservatives. Last week’s local election, the London outcome and the latest YouGov poll all point to support shedding away from the governing party throughout the country. If it’s happening nationally then surely the same must be being experienced in C&N?

The most important factor for a party defending is the extent to which it can get its support out and the signs nationally suggest that this might be very hard for Labour. Even in Sedgefield last July at the start of Gordon Brown’s media honeymoon the Labour candidate saw his party’s vote drop by 14%. Labour supporters have bad record of turning out in elections when the government of the country is not at stake.

Even when they are starting from third place, like here, the Lib Dems always have the potential to pull off a shock. Could they start appealing to Labour supporters that the only way of stopping a Tory victory is by switching to them?

So even if you have never posted here before please share with us your experiences. Let’s see if we can get a good picture of what is going on. Many thanks.

Latest by election betting.

Mike Smithson

A 24 seat shift to Cameron’s party in just ten days

The spread firm, SportingIndex, has just put up its new general election commons seats spreads following the YouGov poll overnight suggesting that Labour are on just 23% - a massive 26% behind.

When we last looked at this, a week last Tuesday and two days before polling, I posed the question - “Will punters believe in a Tory majority after Thursday?”.

Well they have and the Tory spread has moved from 318-324 seats up to the latest 342-348 seats. So taking the mid-point in the spread the market is suggesting a Tory seat total of 345 seats - or an overall majority of 40.

I think that this is just about the first time ever since spread betting was launched in the UK that gamblers have been prepared to risk money on the Tories getting a workable majority.

Clearly the polling has helped and so has Boris’s victory in London. Market sentiment has now moved to believing that David Cameron will be the next prime minister.

Mike Smithson

Ever since the betting markets opened on the Crewe and Nantwich by election all the money has been going one way. Ladbrokes opened with a 4/5 Tory price which then went to 4/7 and is now at 1/2.

Betfair has seen a big rush to get on the Tories and, as I write, the best you can get is 0.34/1. Another bookmaker has 4/9.

But is punter confidence in the Tories justified - after all we have to go back until June 1982 to find the last time that the party gained a seat in a Westminster by-election?

The central questions are how many of the 22,140 who voted for Gwyneth Dunwoody in 2005 have switched and, the extent to which party machine is be able to get its core vote to the polling stations on May 22nd. For Labour always finds it much harder to get its people out in elections when the government of the country is not at stake - just look at last week’s locals.

The national general election polls are telling us two things: that Labour supporters are much less likely than Tories to say they are certain to vote and that between 12% and 20% of those who say they were Labour in 2005 have now switched to the Tories.

On the face of it then it’s a no-brainer - if the Tories can maintain the bulk of their general election vote of 14,162 and are attracting Labour switchers on the scale that the polls are suggesting then Cameron will do it.

The fly in the ointment could be the Lib Dems who polled a creditable 8,083 three years ago. Their initial task is to persuade enough of the electors that voting for them, and not the Tories, is the best way of unseating Labour. They have also got a terrific by election record, hundreds of activists who flood into the area every day to help, and a track record of producing by election literature that works.

Their challenge is not being squeezed out with the media increasingly presenting the current political situation in two party terms. What happened to the Lib Dem vote in London shows where that can lead.

By election polls. We have only seen two of these in recent years - at Hartlepool in 2004 and in Gwent last year. In the former the Labour vote was hugely inflated while in the latter the poll got the final outcome wrong. They are very difficult for pollsters to do because it’s hard getting a representative sample. Also opinion is more likely than at other elections to change during a campaign. I don’t know whether there will be one but if there is I would treat it with ultra caution.

Mike Smithson

Some depressing words for Labour supporters in Polly Toynbee’s Tuesday Guardian column this morning.

After having this to say about May 22nd “..for the Conservatives are no longer the stupid party. Watch them win the Crewe and Nantwich byelection, easy…” she goes on:-

“…It is Labour that has become the stupid party - dumb, directionless, depressing. That’s why the voters gave them that 24% sucker punch: it wasn’t about ideology, it was about basic political competence. As the Conservatives unfurl new policies for the next election, how can Labour oppose them? It’s a poser because Labour has no firm territory of its own to stand on. They can hardly castigate Tory “reforms” out-sourcing more of education and the NHS. Labour did that too. Or rebut Tory promises to be even tougher on crime, sentencing and filling up more prisons, because Labour did that too. Favouring business and the hyper-rich? Labour did it too. Ungenerous to the poor? Labour will trip over its 10p tax debacle. Housing? Labour built the least since the war. Europe? Labour has been as Eurosceptic as the Tories are likely to be. So the party risks being struck dumb on almost every Tory policy - left to whinge on the sidelines about small differences of detail…”

Mike Smithson