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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » How online polls are producing higher LAB and UKIP shares
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » How online polls are producing higher LAB and UKIP shares while phone surveys are best for the LDs and Greens
After my post last night on how there is a big gap between phone and online polling on the CON+LAB aggregates I decided to take this a bit further looking at how each party fared under each approach.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11246195/Fairness-is-it-really-so-hard-for-our-snobbish-political-elite-to-understand.html
We're entering that time of year when the political hacks want to keep politics in the news but, actually, no-one's very interested. It's the build up to Christmas and we don't want politics and politicians in our faces.
" Unless you fall into one of the following categories Labour no longer represents your interests in any way: public sector workers, trade unionists, those in receipt of benefits, single mothers on low or no incomes, recently settled immigrants, the low paid and part-time workers receiving credits. For the rest of us, they have nothing what so ever to offer other than their poisonous and divisive ideologically motivated politics of envy, and ever higher taxes to service their burgeoning client base and vested interest groups. Labour is an anachronistic party now out of it's time, pitifully out of touch with the electorate and the climate of public opinion; which it holds in utter contempt. Economically illiterate, it has acknowledged its complicity in little, apologised for less, and promises more of the same if it get back into office in 2015
I wonder if the new pro Indy paper will stand the test of time.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/tomorrow-the-national-a-new-daily-paper-for-scotland.25941314
Looking at recent elections, do you know which polling methodology came nearest to the actual result?
You could be forgiven for thinking that most modern political parties dont listen to very much, they largely give the appearance of being a "mutual enjoyment" meeting on a small number of sofas. Epic amounts of groupthink appear to be the order of the day.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?
(How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? And for how long will that madness of yours mock us? To what end will your unbridled audacity hurl itself?)
It was always thus. I suppose the increasing sophistication of political parties has encouraged them to play to sections of our community rather than pretending to address it all. But the conceit that we are being particularly badly served by this current generation of politicians is no more than that.
Makes a change to read an objective post rather than read endless right-wing diatribe (take note Miss Plato, Scott_P and other right wing loons)...
Labour Should go back to their roots
The majority of earlier politicians has some conviction, some hinterland, some experience of life, by the time they came to parliament they wanted to actually achieve something. Most were successful enough that politics was a significant step down in income. The modern politician wants to not upset the tabloids and scrape together 35% of the vote, some ambition!
That said pollsters learn from their mistakes, hence their adjustments and filters, and it is possible that this historic trend will not continue. The consistent bias identified by Mike in these threads will presumably mean (if it continues to the election) that we will have a clear winner and loser between the 2 classes of polls once again.
My suspicion is that the phone polls will continue to be more accurate, partly for the reason @felix has already identified.
I just cannot believe that anyone would choose the very rough trade of politics unless they believed passionately that they could make a difference. The modern techniques of politics are not exactly to my taste either but your cynicism is overdone in my opinion.
Indigo is more than half right. The issue for me is not that some politicians do not have convictions. It is that they know their convictions do not resonate with the man in the street and so they resort to base mendacity. Take Miliband. He is a pretty much an unreconstructed champagne Islington socialist, whose default mindset is openly contemptuous of white van man small 'c' conservative England and its instinctive patriotism. So he is forced to embark on a series of ever more contemptible lies to pretend he respects them. What people hate is not so much that he is what he is, but that he pretends he isn't - because he knows how that plays in van land. Ed and the whole Labour party are living a lie day in day out. And it's plain for all to see.
Ditto, to (in my view) a much smaller degree, for Dave and his metropolitan disdain for the small 'c' conservatism of his natural base (eg gay marriage, huskies, overseas aid, blah, blah, blah).
Ditto Clegg to (in my view) a larger degree with his EU-phile open contempt of most British people's desire to govern themselves, as he pretends it would be better for us to let Brussels run everything.
It's not the elitist views they hold which people hate most (although this theme is pretty strong!). It's the lying about it. Brazenly and obviously. Contemptibly.
The thrilling attraction of UKIP for many is that they hold openly non-PC, non-elitist, man-in-the-street views about the key issues of our day - and, even more thrillingly, they do it openly and unashamedly. Love em or hate em they wear their views on their sleeves.
http://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/the-pb-2010-polling-league-table/
The problem is I think that online polls need people to initiate contact with the pollsters.
If the online pollers were spamming people asking their opinions it would help (but be very unwelcome indeed)
Dave, Nick and Ed are all sons of millionaires, all went to Oxbridge, all essentially went straight from university into politics, what experience of life, of business, of real people did they bring with them ? I am sure it was for the right reasons, we can hardly be surprised when the cry goes up from ordinary people that the political classes dont understand them, and the "understand people like us" polls are in subterranean territory!
I agree with DavidL on the basic motivation - nearly everyone gets into politics to try to make the country/community/world better, and I assume that's why most PB contributors are interested too. Thre's no denying that once you go full-time and get into one "team" or another, there's a tendency to think backwards from "what would make my party popular" [and thus enable us to do good stuff] instead of first thinking what would be beneficial and then thinking how to make it popular. A reason Blair and Thatcher stand out is that they rather consistently approached politics the latter way, and people sensed it and respected it.
Do parties only look after certain interest groups and despise everyone else? In principle no, and Janet Daley's list has serious flaws anyway - we don't get significant support from people who live on benefits (by and large they don't vote) and without the idealist vote (which crosses class boundaries) Labour would have no chance whatever. But clearly it's tempting to listen more to someone who supports you a lot than someone who wouldn't vote for you whatever you did. I was briefing 20 Greenpeace volunteers the other day on how to lobby MPs persuasively, and one said he always voted Green regardless of how environmentally-friendly and supportive his MP was; I told him that it would materially damage his effectiveness if he made that clear.
Note by the way that although I support PR, it does reinforce the "only targets some groups" approach. Under PR you can do quite well with support only from one part of society, and you'll never win outright anyway. FPTP forces us all to make an effort to reach into other sectors.
Because it takes a lot of years to get to the top of the greasy poll and because it seems in vogue to have leaders who are young (ish) and vigorous those who have had careers elsewhere will find it difficult to get to the top.
It's a bit like my father, he started as a private in the Black Watch. He eventually got a commission from the ranks when that was still very unusual but by the time he achieved this he was already limited as to what he could achieve because you had to be a certain age to get promotions. He finished his career as a Captain. It just wasn't possible to go any further.
So those who enter politics late with some life experience are capable of making the cabinet and bringing that experience to bear but they are unlikely to make the top job. I think only Hammond could claim to have a serious career before politics.
Should it be this way? Probably not. Personally I think the new Labour obsession against second jobs for back benchers was a mistake for this reason. It meant politicians could get real life experience even when elected and apply what they had learnt to the policies they espoused. But that is not the modern way.
He was actually thinking "The same contempt I have for George Galloway and all of his party...Euuuuuuugh...."
Of course on-line pollsters have the same problem unless their 'well' of electorate is sufficiently large.
Is old-fashioned street/door polling the best method - but will be the most expensive.
F1: will try and get the post-race piece done this morning.
Take the Indyref, three pollsters won the top pollster crown, two out of those three were phone polls.
PS. The variant I really like here is Liquid Democracy, where if you care enough you can decide who represents you issue-by-issue (or even do it yourself) instead of having to give your whole share of the government to the same person for the duration.
Truly populist politicians take comfort in a mythical time when things were so much better. Populist politicians follow the herd who think this. Populist politicians say what they know voters want to hear, rather than telling them what they need to hear. Populist politicians don't take bold steps that move the country forward.
I want a politician who is prepared to confront populism head-on. If they can't persuade the herd in due course, then they will get thrown out. But heaven help us if we have politicians who don't even try.
The problem is the media always latches on to the pollsters who consistently produce the wildly inaccurate numbers because they make the best and most immediate headlines.
Interestingly, the other one was Panelbase, an online pollster, who stopped taking on new panel members in 2013, because of a Nat infestation in new sign ups.
Oh, they haven't. But the Tories have. Twice.
The only big outlier, was Angus Reid, who were 4.7% out.
Look at phone pollsters for the combined Lab + Con score.
Under FPTP, it is essentially down to the leaders of the two main parties to try to create a broad electoral coalition that will deliver them a majority. In the current media climate they have to actively suppress the open debate over the various trade-offs that this creates and pretend that this represents a grand unified ideology for government.
Under PR you bring a lot of this process out in to the open. The different interest groups get to test their electoral strength and then the compromises happen either with a formation of a Coalition, or by open debate in Parliament on an issue-by-issue basis [which would be my preference].
At the moment it is interesting to note that some countries with PR electoral systems still have relatively large parties that represent a fairly broad range of opinion - such as the CDU in Germany. This is because there are still several benefits to forming a large party based on an internal coalition. Historically it's generally proved to be better to be the larger party in a multi-party coalition, for example.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/11249207/Give-Ed-Miliband-a-Darwin-Award-for-his-Emily-Thornberry-decision.html
Cameron, Clegg and Miliband all have politics 'in the blood'. In Miliband's case it would have arisen from the wide group of left wing thinkers and politicians who hovered round his father in the 1950s and 1960s.
Look at our current generation of politicians. There are dozens of parliamentarians who are related to one another, whose parents were active in national or municipal politics and their links cross the party divide.
On here we have often recently commented on the fact young Straw, Prescott, Kinnock, Benn, Blair and many others are either scrambling to get a Westminster seat or have effectively already secured one.
Even looking at PB regulars who probably reflect little of wider society, how many of us have either been involved in the political arena at a recognised level as candidates etc and/or count well known and lesser known politicians among our ancestors and other family members? Indeed it is quite likely that with a little research we could establish extended family groupings among PBers. In my case, from comments made over the years it is highly probable that Jack W, Charles and NPXMP are distant cousins and therefore not surprising we have a mutual interest in politics.
NB Coalition not Tory government at present.
Edit: Years old, maybe it's already happened??
No they dump that on others and Indeed at least once 81/82 now I wonder why that was? Being an economic genius as are you will be aware then that unemployment is a lagging indicator. In case that is not clear check the graph on the link.
"No Labour government has ever left power with unemployment lower than when it started" .....Compare and contrast.
https://fullfact.org/economy/labour_government_record_unemployment-31114
http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/panelbase-bans-new-members-from-independence-polls-1-3080830
Making charitable donations to foreign nationals is not a reasonable justification for that.
It's too early in the morning to start a food fight, but borrowing money to just give it away to foreigners is absurd. If Cameron and his liberal clique care so much about poverty, they can give their own money away. I think it is Cameron just paying his buddies who work for foreign aid charities on £50k a year.
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/abu-dhabi-post-race-analysis.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/gordon-brown/11249213/Gordon-Brown-failed-us-all.-Will-anyone-miss-him.html
And that's despite 30-odd revisions to the definition of unemployed, which famously led to 2 million being dumped on the sick.
The Tory record on unemployment is utterly dreadful. Far worse than Labour's. Far far worse.
If telephone polls are more accurate that's good news in particular, for the Tories.
Each Labour government has left office with unemployment higher than when it assumed power.
That's not a track record to boast about.
Labour still is the party of the working class. The party does not represent those who are self-employed and very reluctant to pay direct or indirect taxes.
Some people think this group is also working class. But they don't. They changed over to Maggie in 1979. Now they are Kippers.
Ewwww! I feel your pain! What a crew eh? But they've still got a vote....
So long as inflation is low.
LOL.
At the same time, many ABC1 workers are now Labour supporters who 40 years ago were not generally.
I remember very well the Police were very much against Labour in the 80's. I wouldn't say that today. The RCN whilst officially neutral was clearly sympathetic towards the Tories. Certainly, not today.
Even Scotland used to send more than 10 MPs to Westminster as did Manchester, Birmingham etc.
Who's feeling the pain?
You think democracy is best served by coalitions of cliques of the inept, bumbling along with Government from one election to another, where nothing and no-one really changes?
I upset Socrates a few threads ago by saying I wasn't British. In fact, anyone who has read my posts or has met me in person would say I am unashamedly Italian and Catholic.
I've found this attitude beneficial because it lets everyone know where they stand in relation to you - they either don't care or despise you straight away.
What people can't stand is being lied to or taken for fools.
No-one can accuse UKIP of that.
Any views on a decent anti virus package for a small office and a few laptops? Mine expires in a couple of weeks and I have no idea what is a good package these days. Any help much appreciated.
"scurvy, mealy-mouthed hyena" has a certain je ne said quoi about it, though!
You say Labour are not only for the public sector - and offer in support of that how many police and nurses support them!
Maybe you could offer some private sector working man examples of where Labour are popular.
Similarly, what sort of legitimacy has the EU? I haven't noticed much thirst of politicians to enable the sacking of that particular institution.
As I said, government by clique.