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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » If LAB’s polling gap with CON had throughout been 6% worse
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » If LAB’s polling gap with CON had throughout been 6% worse than it was Miliband would have been replaced
The table above shows the YouGov monthly averages from its daily polls for the period 2013-2015. These numbers are being highlighted to make a statement about all the pollsters – that for much of the last parliament Labour enjoyed substantial leads and it was only in recent months that this started to decline.
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Labour don't do regicide though, do they?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiq-SbIW_Oo
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farage/11642293/David-Cameron-in-split-with-Theresa-May-and-Michael-Gove-over-human-rights.html
There is a worrying prospect that something like this proposal for statutory regulation of opinion polling could be enacted. The British Polling Council need to act to restore confidence in the industry.
Politics does seem to be illogical at times.
Every time Labour lose an election, a section of their party blame it on not being left enough despite the example of Blair being successful and Ed and Foot not.
Cameron claims to be able to reduce immigration by 100,000s, no ifs no buts, despite being hemmed in by the EU and other external factors.
At least the Labour party can blame the electorate.
If Tory polling had been reported as 6% better than Labour throughout, there is still every chance that Ed would have remained as leader as too few in Labour have the bottle to depose poor leaders (see Gordon Brown for details). – However, we would have been spared several hundred EICIPM posts.
Of course, after Liam's note (itself an homage to Reggie Maudling's handover to Jim Callaghan) maybe Khan should have known better.
Not sure about this. Labour stuck with Michael Foot and Gordon Brown, both of whom did far worse in the polls than the dismal Miliband would have, even if they had been accurate. Also it is far from certain that anybody else would have done any better, especially given the signal that changing horses midstream (when exactly? A year ago? Six months?) gives.
But in the nature of things, we will of course never know.
You lost because too many of your supporters sat on their hands or else voted Ukip.
Sometimes being not-Tory isn't enough.
I'm surprised someone did not intervene on animal-welfare grounds.
We are now to believe, after the event, that everyone in Labour knew Ed was Crap. If that is really so - and there was a mass of evidence from the very early polling in Ed's term in office that stubbornly refused to improve - then it was a failure of political nerve.
"If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease, success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come."
But Labour were more loyal, more stupid, or more afraid of the wrath of their paymasters than their political opponents would have been. The Tories and the LibDems were ruthless in "jumping the life to come" and moving out electoral duffers. Or maybe it was a stubbornness, a refusal to react when your opponent constantly advises you to change your leader. Must be really galling to acknowledge they have a point. But that ploughing on regardless has resulted in its worst defeat in a generation.
After a couple of years of the public seeing Ed, their view of him was still getting worse. Labour bet the farm on the voters being wrong. That is about as wrong as it gets in politics.
They did not remove the man who was Deputy Prime Minister. You can see why that might have been a problem.
The Tories did not remove Prime Minister David Cameron. You can see why that might have been a problem.
I think you need to reassess what failure looks like.
As for the Conservatives after 2010: Cameron won nearly a hundred seats; a success by anyone's standards. The reasons he did not get a majority were because of the low seat base and the fact he was facing the nastiest party ever: the party of McBride.
http://order-order.com/2015/05/31/robbo-finally-confirms-baldwin-briefed-milly-dowler-moment/
Nasty Labour.
Remember that: you heard it here first. ;-)
And anyway, before it does more talking, it needs to do some listening. Listening to uncomfortable truths from those who they arrogantly regarded as "our own". But who went elsewhere. Or nowhere. Not even to the polling station.
Blair did the same thing before 1997 in ignoring the hard left that had led Labour to defeat after defeat. It was just that most of those leftists were too dumb to vote for anyone else, and continued voting Labour.
I think the problems started around Oct 14 because that is when Labour stabilised according to Yougov and the rest of the pollsters. From that point on it looked like the Tories were making modest to no progress with every step forward matched by a step back. In reality I suspect that they made gradual progress over the months to polling day.
If there is anything in this then the urgent need to replace Ed based on polling evidence would have come too late. If Labour had already been behind in March 14 then maybe but I am not sure they were.
The problem with Ed was that he was crap. His organisational skills were crap. He refused to engage with those in Labour who knew how to campaign and win and built surely the worst electoral team that Labour has ever had, people who still thought they had won when the polls closed. His policy agenda was crap, made up of a series of "populist" announcements without any thought about the implications of those policies, sent others off to think up policies and then ignored them. His contributions to Scotland were crap before and after the referendum. His speechmaking was crap, just total crap.
Labour were willing to ignore all this. They have no one to blame but themselves.
Or should Labour just listen to those who are fully paid up party members?
Crosby saw the reality and the opportunity there ruthlessly deploying his key resources including Cameron into Lib Dem seats, even so called safe ones. It was a brilliant call requiring nerves of steel because it was predicated on Labour getting basically nowhere in the Tory/Labour marginals.
Polly thinks it was the polling that kept ed in place.
I fear the Labour party is discussing people......which I know can be a proxy for 'ideas' - but I fear is just a proxy for labels; 'Blairite' and so forth.....
Lord Ashcroft, ICM had Tory leads of 6%, ComRes had a Tory lead of 4%, Opinium 4% a week to a fortnight from election day.
Chap at ComRes pointed out the Tories had achieved consistent crossover in the phone polls from Christmas, ICM showed something similar.
When you read some of the stories that have come out since the election it is clear that Dan Hodges was guilty of absurd caution and understatement in his rants. In failing to react to such failures they have no one to blame but themselves.
When fighting a government they had convinced themselves was nasty and incompetent in 2015, Ed and his team lost seats and gained only a minimal vote share increase.
There were many open goals against Cameron's government, and Labour failed to exploit them. Perhaps they should have spent less time in their unmoral crusade against the NotW (*) and more on things that matter to people.
(*) A massively hypocritical and nasty campaign given what has emerged about the Mirror Group.
There are delusional types in both parties.
If you want conviction politicians this is what you get.
The pollsters just need to do a bit better at teasing out our real choice.
To be cruel, is it really about how pink the 'Red Tories' (to borrow a phrase) are going to be.
I wonder if the PLP's commendable sang froid under fire (cf the Tories, who 'only ever panic in a crisis'...) will change?
How often will they follow a dud over the cliff?
One was unfortunate, two looks like carelessness.....
Labour was and still is a policy free zone. Why would you vote for them ?
Whatever went wrong with polling is much more serious than just a last-minute change (although that might have been a small component).
I'm not sure I buy this.
Brown had Labour on 19% at one point. Labour wibbled about Miliband but never mounted a serious challenge.
It was known at the time - all the way back to Operation Motorman in 2003.......
The other important question is whether Labour would have acted anyway. This divides into two sub-questions: would the party have had the appetite for change and who would bell the cat?
As others have noted, Labour is very slow to replace poor leaders. It needs to break that habit.
For Ed Miliband to have been replaced earlier, it would have required one of the contenders - perhaps Yvette Cooper - to have broken ranks and called for a change. Candidly, they probably should have done this anyway. But there was never an obvious point in the last Parliament. Maybe late 2012 was the time, but at that point the economy remained firmly in the doldrums. By late 2013, when the economy was clearly turning round, Ed Miliband had actually seized the initative effectively with his cost of living campaign.
Labour in fact came quite close in late 2014 to replacing Ed Miliband after his disastrous conference speech. Peter Mandelson more or less admitted that he had tried to persuade Alan Johnson to take over the reins and that Alan Johnson had been unpersuadable. Would he have been more persuadable if the polls were worse? Maybe, if the pressure had been more intense and coming from more sources.
This is a long post to say I don't know what Labour would have done.
There's also the other reason people like me made fools of ourselves regarding eicipm and that's because all of the companies suggested that as likely. All of them. It seemed implausible all were wrong in the same direction but they were.
Either they were were interpreting the signals wrong or they missed the signals. Both difficult to address but the latter more so,
This time around, they had to present something worth voting for.
Oh.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/11641880/Calls-to-overhaul-service-texts-to-refer-to-God-as-first-female-bishops-take-up-posts.html
Hmm. Didn't Labour get the same vote share in 2005 but with a 60 odd seat majority?
The ComRes guy/Mirror sitting on that poll is a tip of an iceberg.
Yet Labour concentrated on NotW for utterly partisan reasons. It wa a very peculiar moral crusade, fed by lies from News Group's competitor, the Guardian.
And as we see today, Baldwin was still trying to peddle the Dowler line earlier this year.
Still, as SO shows, Labour can commit any amount of sins and people will still vote for them because, well, at least they're not Tories.
PD & Co 5 regions (holding Tuscany, Marche, Puglia and Umbria. Gaining Campania but losing Liguria)
Centre-Right 2 (holding Veneto, losing Campania but gaining Liguria)
YouGov for the Sun
Con 41 Lab 30 LD 7 UKIP 13 Greens 4