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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » A four horse race is now emerging in France following the rise of leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon
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Hopefully like Le Pen (though 'd prefer her to be third or fourth)
I laid so much Bush last year.
Bit irksome. I'd prefer Melenchon not to get through into the second round.
F1: my analysis of yesterday's race, which has several notes perhaps useful for the rest of the season, is up here: http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/china-post-race-analysis-2017.html
[Not that up on French politics but the odds have looked rather peculiar].
I think I should do about the same once David Miliband doesn't become the next Labour leader. Probably the same mugs backing him tbh.
A sentance I can never repeat often enough with enough incredulity.
Notwithstanding the polling, I think he'd be crushed in Round 2, unless he faced Le Pen.
Poutou is the other problem for Melenchon. He's on Jean Jacques Bourdin (the French Paxman) this morning and is coming across very unpresidential and unstatesmanlike, but in a good way - he is, unsurprisingly, the only candidate who genuinely seems like a man of the people (doesn't speak in platitudes etc). I think he could get enough votes in the 1st round to deny Melenchon a top 2 position as well.
The fact is after the disaster that was Hollande, the French centre-right only had to find a candidate with a functioning brain cell to get to the last two and trounce a Le Pen in the run off - yet they choose Francois Fillon.
Even when his foibles were revealed (ooer !), instead of dumping him or persuading him to fall on his sword to be replaced by Juppe who has all the charisma of a cold rice pudding but nonetheless would still have got to the run off and beaten Le Pen, the French conservatives dithered, gave Fillon another chance and he's floundered again.
Yes, he might scrape past Macron into the last two but back him if you're that confident. All I see is a lot of wishful thinking that the Elysee might be filled by someone who will be "nice" to us during the A50 negotiations.
Imagine if we had to deal with a President Melanchon - Jeremy Corbyn would be over there every week. Reading the tweet posted by HYUFD, it's the sort of thing Corbyn supporters are posing over here - the French centre-right are as much sore losers as the British Left.
In my day job of digital product management, we almost totally regard what people say they want and say they do in favour of what we measure they actually do. What people say they'll do is a very poor signal.
Is it time for polls to do something similar?
From what little I know of French demographics and electoral statistics, I thought FN did very well among pensioners as well. Isn't Fillon's problem he isn't the only game in town with the older voters ?
Let me ask you directly, as a Conservative supporter, who do YOU want to win the French election ? Fillon or Le Pen ?
I don't really care who wins - I don't think it affects negotiations as much as Remainers seem to want to paint it. All that said, Macron seems like hype squared and incredibly flashy and panny. I'm all green, but layed Macron out to just £ 0.84.
But in political terms what they "actually do" is vote a particular way, or indeed not vote.
Can you summarise in a short post how you would apply what you propose to polling?
In 2017 Macron might be seen as an acceptable, not to say particularly French version of the deep radicalism that has swept the globe since.
An argument as to why Melenchon will not only be President, but also win the first round:
1. He is the only candidate with real sustained momentum in the polls.
2. At least a third of the voters are reported to be undecided. Turnout is usually very high, over 80% in 2012. Most expect turnout to be down this time around, but even if it fell to 75% then there are at least 20% who will vote who have not yet made up their minds.
3. The Presidential race puts more emphasis on personality than policies, unlike a GE.
4. Melenchon is seen as the most popular politician and the least unpopular politician in France at the moment.
https://www.lesechos.fr/medias/2017/04/07/2050135_presidentielle-2017-les-sondages-des-echos-web-tete-0211955709354.jpg
5. If he makes it to the second round, he has proved beyond doubt that he is a star performer in TV debates. Not only that, his performance does shift voting intentions, as we have seen.
6. It seems to be a misconception that Melenchon's momentum will come to a halt because he has already squeezed Hamon's support about as much as he can. Certainly over half of his improvement has been at Hamons expense, but not all. If you compare just about any poll from a Company from 2-3 weeks ago with their most current poll you will see that not all his increase has come at the expense of Hamon. The rest has probably come from undecided supporters not previously aligned with any candidate and there are a lot of them. (See point 2)
I don't expect any polls showing him to be in the top two, as most of the undecided are likely to remain undecided until the day itself or at least a day or two before the vote in just two weeks time.
I will probably end up with egg on my face and he will come trailing in 4th place, but FWIW, I think the reasons above show that there could be a major shock on the cards.
But setting that aside for a moment, surely it is not in the UK's interest to have one of its very close neighbours and allies being governed by someone leading a party with fascist tendencies and antecedents and whose leader was reported this weekend as making the sorts of comments about Jews which would have us (some of us, anyway) in conniptions if made by the Leader of the Opposition here?
Britain stands up to fascism - or used to anyway. Why would we welcome it coming back to the European continent?
But measuring what people do is what gets done by the sorts of people who don't understand that the mark of true professionals is their judgment and that judgment cannot be measured through box-ticking exercises.
The rise of box-ticking is one reason why we have so much mediocrity around us.
But if you look at the level of modelling, and "behaviour prediction" if you like used by big companies to sell you stuff, It's staggering - and kind of creepy - how much they know about what you do, and what you're going to do in future.
Applying that level of analysis to politics would make current polling - "How are you going to vote on such and such a day?" seem pretty crude.
On the other hand, big companies can do what they do because they have in spending terms, a detailed record of your behaviour - but nobody has the same level of information about how you actually voted (at least I hope not).
Bombing Syria with the wrong co-ordinates..
The hilarious thing this morning was when we told that a train that normally doesn't stop at Woking would call at the station. Of course, it hurtled through the station as normal to much amusement of the waiting passengers.
As well as tactical opinion poll answering we should also be on the lookout for what one might call satirical voting - e.g. a Trump-hater voting for him in the hope that he gets in and his presidency is so disastrous that it destroys the credibility of the alt right.
So we should not measure the death rates of the patients of surgeons? And try to improve the performance of the worst?
Or look at infection rates in hospitals..? And let patients know what they are?
(I looked at the latter when my wife had the first of her two hip ops.. We chose to run away from our local hospitals. Unsurprisingly they not only had high infection rates but also poor standards of care..Now much improved). Her ops were excellent and trouble free)
We'll see.
As for Le Pen, her problem is holding together the huge contradictions of FN. Some FN supporters are economically liberal, others aren't. In one breath, Le Pen talks about protecting the 35-hour working week and safeguarding the pensions and other benefits enjoyed by French civil servants and in the next she's talking about a bonfire of regulation though she also wants protectionism.
The internal contradictions of "economic patriotism" are laid bare.
It's like pretending to be on the side of working people and then raising their taxes....
Box-ticking is not evidence. For example, ticking a box saying that a person has read a document does not show you whether they have understood it. How do you assess that? There are ways of doing this but they involve some element of assessment and thought and, yes, judgment. Too often the latter are undervalued or ignored and all the focus is on the action taken i.e. the reading of the document in my example.
Collecting information is fine. But it is not the end of the matter. You have to really read it; you have to really understand it; and then you have to act on it. Too often people think that the mere collection of information is enough without any intelligent attempt at understand what it is telling you. And what it is not telling you. And what weight to put on it. It is also foolish - and may be dangerous - to rely only on one source of information.
I think that is not correct.
One without the other leads to mistakes. I have seen the most serious mistakes come from someone who claims experience assuming they've seen something before.
The genuinely most experienced people know that they know nothing, keep a fresh mind and act according to evidence.
That is judgement.
Le Pen's price is more difficult to understand. Her best chance of winning is to face Fillon in round 2 and the odds of that happening are probably greater than Le Pen's current odds of being President. And even then she would be the outsider of the two. It's not even as if her support is growing at all, she was polling 26-27 before the first TV debate and has dropped 2 or 3 points since then.
She really suffered from just being just one of a number of anti-establishment candidates in the debates, and now the momentum is all against her. Now, right at the worst moment, she's retoxified her party with a row over the details of the holocaust.
I'm with Cyclefree on box-ticking in general. There is a great temptation to be guided by things that can easily be measured just because they can be measured. You can take steps to improve the figures - for example you can cut waiting list times at the expense of emergency care, or by making fake appointments. But improving the figures in itself doesn't necessarily mean you're doing a better job.
-21.8 Le Pen
+19.6 Macron
-33.6 Fillon
+7.9 Juppe
-1.3 Other
+5.5 Baroin
+20 Melenchon
-5 Hamon
Final 2: -0.08/+0.89 Le Pen/Melenchon anyway
A bit like the online world these days - lots of figures are collected but very few people have any clue what they really mean, or if they mean anything at all.
You are not the only one suffering a dose of cynicism this morning
Who'd have thought, the main PS candidate at 570.0 on Betfair 2 weeks out and not looking anything like value ?
I caught the train as normal but it terminated at Oxted and we were thrown off to catch an electric train (sort of counter intuitive). I asked why if the snow issue was with the electric trains. I was told that this train always terminated here. I pointed out that I caught it everyday and it did no such thing. I was told it did. After a bit of 'It did', 'It did not' exchange it was pointed out to me that there was no through train on a Saturday. I pointed out it was Tuesday to be told we are running a Saturday service today. I gave up at that point.
For the next week or so we never saw a train at all at Eridge. Every day I was told the trains would return tomorrow. They didn't. Rumour had it that the diesels were pinched to service 'more important' lines suffering from the snow.
Have the Nukes started flying yet?
Can anyone explain what franchising is for? No. Get rid.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/londons-worst-rail-operators-for-lateness-are-revealed-a3201686.html
https://twitter.com/LordAshcroft/status/851365231343403009