Tory lead cut to 6% in poll ..
- Thread starter weltweit
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stethoscope
Well-Known Member
I still get the feeling that Osborne might be ousted at some point as shadow chancellor (or chancellor if god forbid they get in).
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
Ah, I see
I see too many individual fights going on amongst and between different parts of individual L, G, B, T groups in order to try and claim/maintain ideological ground and win teh identity politics war, let alone LGBT as a whole
Also there is a feeling among some that being gay is the be and end all of everything.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Davey Ravey Gravey is in a bit of a bind over the Chancellor role. GO is his mate, and also one of the planks he's rebuilt the image of the Tories under, however he's not CoE material.
However, the best candidate (for the Tories) - Ken Clarke, who's already done the job once and made a decent fist of it - he can't use because it would reopen all the tory infighting over Europe (KC being about the biggest name in the party now who is a Europhile), so he's stuck at BIS/BERR/DTI/Whatever it gets renamed after the GE.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
It will be interesting to see how he does against Cable and Darling in the Chancellors telly debate thing too - his (GO's) repetition of 'I can't tell you what I'm going to do until after we're elected, beyond saying we might cut spending quickly, or slowly depending on how either one plays with the voters' probably isn't going to cut it.
Nah, the best person the Tories could front is Hague.
Probably a bit before his time as leader of the party and was ostracised during the melee of the Tories coming unstuck during the Blair years.
A damn good speaker and one of the very few Tories I admire as a politician, he would probably be the bloke who has a strong enough view and the balls to back it up to be leader of the party again in the future and reclaim all the Telegraph readers who are deserting the Tories for UKIP in droves.
Clarke is a dinosaur who will only appeal to the real old-school.
Hague's a sitting target right now though, on account of his serial cockups over Ashcroft.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Aside from his failure to notice Ashcroft and tendency to hang out with neo-Nazis in the EU of course. And the 14 pints debacle. Clarke's a better politician and a lot smarter than wee Willie.
Combustible
Well-Known Member
It's often tempting to ascribe competence to Hague as he can be a bit witty sometimes but on top of all you mention, this was a man who ignored all the naysayers to back Jeffrey Archer for London Mayor.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
Actually, most of the YouGov polls were as wrong as everyone else. It was only the YouGov polls commissioned by the Evening Standard which got it right. Either because they used a better model to predict actual turnout, or because their ideological biases happened to mirror the actual turnout in different areas.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
Sheer dumb luck is the same as their ideological biases matching the actual turnout. It was differential turnout that defeated Ken - he got more votes than when he was elected previously, but a lower % because of Tory turnout.
Here's the plot I put together of the different polls in the run up to Boris getting elected:
YouGov only got it right when they were reflecting the ideological biases of the ES as a client.
Here's the plot I put together of the different polls in the run up to Boris getting elected:
YouGov only got it right when they were reflecting the ideological biases of the ES as a client.
London_Calling
Pleasant and unpatronising
YouGov were so right so early about London. Even to the extent of (a) the suburbs actually turning out (b) in vastly increased numbers and (c) over-powering an increased vote for Ken.
I don't know what kind of model can predict all that, short of a crystal ball. It's a hell of a thing.
I don't know what kind of model can predict all that, short of a crystal ball. It's a hell of a thing.
belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
ymu has, i think, explained it very well. yougov are (slightly less now than before) renowned for giving the payee the poll they want, so they went along with the standards desire to boost the tory vote, despite not knowing whether that would prove right or not. they then got lucky (although they could argue some clever other polling told them the suburbs were more likely to turn out, something which was, to an extent, guessable beforehand)
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
It's no harder to predict turnout than it is to predict how people would vote if they did turn out.
Most of the polls adjust for likelihood of voting. Some of them ask directly if someone actually intends to vote, some of them ask about how people voted last time and adjust based on the actual results last time. It's one of the points in the debate over the Angus Reid outlying results - they're using a different methodology to predict turnout.
The problem is, to do this sort of polling accurately is very expensive - because you need statistically reliable samples from each marginal, not just the whole country. That Reuters report on Labour being ahead in the key marginals was based on 1007 voters in dozens of marginals. That's not a big enough sample to say anything much.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
But weren't the 3 Yougov/ITN polls from 4,3 and 2 months before the actual election - and so may well have accurately reflected the situation at that time. As the ones carried out in the last 4 weeks before the election for the ES accurately the state of the Johnson/Livingstone battle (not so the lib-dem situation).
Those first Yougov/ITN ones surely cannot be taken as predictions of the final outcome but readings of the situation at that time.
Those first Yougov/ITN ones surely cannot be taken as predictions of the final outcome but readings of the situation at that time.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
The data comes from here, which includes the dates of the polls. The YouGov/ES polls are later than the YouGov/ITN ones, but there are plenty of other late polls that contradict the YouGov/ES results, and no sign of YouGov/ITN being out of whack with other early polls, although there's much less data from that point in time.
ska invita
back on the other side
Labour (Blair rather than GoBro
) did introduce civil partnerships, and deserve some credit for that - the tories certainly wouldnt have.yes there is still a way to go - such as an equal recognition of gay marriage (as opposed to the seperate class 'civil partnership'). There was an interesting challeng of this when a hetro couple got, or rather tried to get, a 'civil partnership': http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/24/heterosexual-couple-refused-civil-partnership
Still, this is a big step forward, and if i were a labour strategist, it would def be on the list of things to brag about
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Sorry, but no - you can't use the results of an attempt to to read voting intentions 4 months prior to the actual election as attempts to read voting intentions in the week prior to the election. That's madness - as mad as using the 20 point lead that yougov gave the national tories in that same month to say they've read the election wrong after the GE! I'm no fan of yougov (tory set up arseholes IMO), but you do to be rigorously fair to them in any sort of analysis.
ska invita
back on the other side
The Tories are still trailing Labour in marginal seats they need to win if they are to secure a Commons majority, according to a poll published today:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ele...rail-Labour-in-marginal-seats-poll-shows.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ele...rail-Labour-in-marginal-seats-poll-shows.html
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
You're right - it's not possible to conclude that the difference between the YouGov/ITN polls are the YouGov/ES polls is all down to ideological bias when they took place so far apart. It is entirely possible that YouGov/ITN would have got the same results just before the election - we just can't tell because YouGov didn't poll for anyone else immediately before the election, and there weren't many others polling early.
So yeah, they might just have a much better methodology. But you'd need to look at their performance across many more elections before you could conclude that. The fact that the ideological biases of the ES matched the differences in turnout in different areas, suggests that sheer dumb luck might have played a big part in it.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
An average across 56 constituencies where they interviewed <20 people in each seat is not telling us very much.
London_Calling
Pleasant and unpatronising
Fwiw, the betting market did respond to yesterday's YouGov's poll but then came back a little. At one point there was a quite radical closing of the expectations as between an Etonian victory and Hung.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
London_Calling
Pleasant and unpatronising
He's disappeared hasn't he Hague: Was he on the Opposition Front Bench for the budget - I don't recall (Osbourne one side, that woman the other)?
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
He's the Shadow Foreign sec, so it's hardly dissappeared...should be tho...
Kid_Eternity
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Looks like Labour got something right with the budget:
If this is repeated in other polls it'll be hugely damaging for Tory morale, it'll embolden the right (and ToryHome types) within the party and cause Cameron all kinds of headaches.
If this is repeated in other polls it'll be hugely damaging for Tory morale, it'll embolden the right (and ToryHome types) within the party and cause Cameron all kinds of headaches.
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