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Why LAB continues to be flattered by the polls – politicalbetting.com
Why LAB continues to be flattered by the polls – politicalbetting.com
On the face of it the latest Wikipedia polling table is very good for LAB and the party is heading for a landslide whenever the election is called
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As artificial intelligence goes multimodal, medical applications multiply
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adk6139
I also predict a record score for NZ in tonights gsme.
Not even convinced it's effective politics:
...Labour also announced plans to treat criminals involved in cross-Channel people-smuggling as terrorists and labelled those who disagreed with the proposals “un-British”...
The expansion of the category of 'terrorist' to include this who are just unpleasant criminals is bad policy.
In, say, March 1996, how many Con voters from GE1992 were saying they didn't know which way they'd vote? And what did the voting pattern of GE1992 Con voters end up looking like in GE1997?
If we can find out, that could be a major piece of evidence to help us decide whether the betting markets this time are about right, or whether they really are consistently overrating the chances of a Lab majority, as you've been saying for some while, Mike.
There is NO guarantee that those apparent missing Boris Brexit voters have any party allegiance whatsoever, nor that they will even vote next year.
If you really want to pursue missing voters go back to the last proper General Election in this country: June 2017
@MikeSmithson
A few things make me sceptical of Mike's assertion that they will vote for Sunak.
1) they are saying DK for a reason, and whatever that reason it needs to be taken seriously.
2) a curious thing about DKs is the gender split. Women are twice as likely to be recorded as DK than men, though equally likely to vote. Whether we call this open mindedness or indecisiveness it is a true phenomenon. Women are a demographic that breaks strongly for Labour.
I don't think the DKs will save Sunaks bacon.
To my mind the more interesting question will be the underlying trend. It seems to me perfectly possible the Tories will see multiple southern seats slip away while consolidating their hold on the midlands and the semi-rural north.
Voting patterns are changing, although I wish they’d change faster.
"Our new methodology fixes that, because it weights up the 2019 Conservative voters who do give a voting intention to account for the fact that others are undecided. This is the main reason our Labour lead is smaller than it otherwise would have been.
We believe this is the more accurate way of reflecting voting intention midterm, although no method is perfect. The main reason for this is because, when we squeeze the voting intentions of those 2019 Conservative voters who are undecided, the majority say they would still vote Conservative if they were forced.
However, it will mean a shift is required in the way our polls are analysed. For the past few months people have generally considered the high number of Conservative don’t knows to be a caveat against the high Labour poll leads. In our case, the opposite is now true. The existence of the high number of 2019 Conservative undecided voters is more likely to increase the Labour lead at a later date rather than decrease it."
https://www.opinium.com/resource-center/uk-voting-intention-27th-january-2022-2/
In Mike's table the lead for Opinium is less than other pollsters, but still 15%. That last sentence in the Quote above is worth digesting.
What I think however too many people are underestimating is the depth of antipathy towards Labour in those areas. They are still deeply unpopular for their decades of being taken for granted. At least with the Tories it’s only been four years.
Low turnout might be the key to the Tories hanging on.
Am I certain? No. Do I think it possible? Yes.
Sounds like pure faith to me.
Pure wishful thinking yd I'm afraid. At least try and keep this fact based.
Nothing in recent polling, including voter party allegiance, the demise of 'Brexit' as a factor, and the positivity towards Labour in the Red Wall, gives any credence to what I suspect to be mere wishful thinking on your part?
Who was that modest self effacing fellow who wrote at the weekend that he had doubts about Labour winning a majority?
Sir Keir Starmer’s chances of forming a majority government have been dealt a blow, according to a poll that reveals support for Labour in Scotland is drifting back to the SNP.
In a reversal of a trend showing Labour almost neck and neck with the nationalists, research for YouGov put clear water between the parties, giving the SNP an 11-point advantage.
The survey is a welcome boost for Humza Yousaf, the first minister, before the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election, his first major electoral test since replacing Nicola Sturgeon in March.
Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said the shift would not be enough for the SNP to win in Rutherglen on October 5. Postal votes for the by-election will be sent out on Friday.
The poll puts support for the SNP at a general election at 38 per cent, up two points since last month, while backing for Labour fell by five points to 27 per cent. Under Westminster boundaries, this would mean the SNP winning 39 seats while Labour would return 11, a significant increase from the ones the party has at present. The SNP holds 44 Westminster seats.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/keir-starmer-risks-losing-seats-as-scottish-support-for-snp-rises-cx7dmcsgw
Starmer could be in deep shit if he fails to win any of the three by elections.
Despite the apparent boost to the SNP’s fortunes, backing for independence fell three points to 39 per cent while an unchanged 44 per cent of people said they wanted to remain in the Union. This left 16 per cent who said they were either undecided, would not vote or refused to reveal their preference.
It’s another good poll for Humza Yousaf after the Redfield & Wilton one.
Sadly not.
I have a very busy weekend so both threads are written already.
Agree with you about NZ tonite though.
It was offensive bullshit from the Tories, and it's equally so from him.
Not clever at all.
Your reports are much appreciated.
On Scotland it does seem to be taking an eternity for Police Scotland to conclude their investigation into the SNP and in the event little comes from it, then a SNP recovery may be on the cards
On Starmer and Cooper 'terrorist' small boats policy it has gone down like a lead balloon across the political spectrum with the Guardian leading the outcry and allowing the conservatives to accuse labour of an open door immigration policy
And as far as I can tell last nights locals were hardly stellar for labour
And we have a year left to GE 24
I still expect a labour majority but the size of it I am very uncertain
PB’ers should be particularly careful not to argue against poll results on the basis of their own assumptions - i.e. thinking the don’t knows will break for the Tories - when the pollster has already made that same assumption and built it into its results.
Won't hear a word against him!
CNN, Wash Post and NY Times all having a go at him today. Have the party higher-ups decided that they can’t run him again in 2024, and are going to try and nominate someone else such as Newsom?
https://x.com/collinrugg/status/1702402539591966999?s=61
Shame they can’t all agree to a maximum age of 70, then we can have two lots of primaries with neither Biden nor Trump getting in the way!
Also asked by a (female) voter about Lib Dems views on what a woman is - I said they had a vagina which I hope is now party policy!
And even with that generous assumption the Labour lead has been around 15% plus or minus a couple of points.
So to stop a Labour majority the Tories need to rely on more than undecided former voters returning home.
In 2019 I witnessed a phenomenon. Low voting Labour areas where suddenly there was a huge turnout. Records smashed according to staff at these polling stations. Then I watched these boxes tipped and tallied them - a Tory landslide.
Never mind a majority of 80, it could have been a majority of 100 had the ultra right not run a spoiler campaign in seats like Stockton North to let Labour cling on.
My hypothesis is that most of these non voters who turned Tory in 2019 won't vote. In key seats this will be a significant number of the DKs. If the Tory vote sinks heavily and the Labour vote rises a little, it will be a Labour gain.
Elsewhere we know a lot of Tories are both sick of and sickened by this government. As we saw in 1997, several million Tory voters are likely to sit on their hands. The commentary on polling posted above said that most DKs would break Tory "if forced". But they won't be forced. Starmer is not Jezbollah, there is no panic issue to force a reluctant Tory vote.
So we could probably go back to late 96 and look at the polls and the DKs and say the same about the Tory deficit then. Don't worry. Tory DKs will vote Tory. No, they won't.
https://www.ft.com/content/d7d5cfb2-d392-48a1-99ea-3567c8f5e552
I’ve always thought Starmer would come a cropper on the small boats (he has no plan, and will be even more spineless than the Tories). But the reckoning might come sooner than the GE
These are not good headlines for Labour
We may well believe that the polling will change, but shouldn't delude ourselves by double counting 2019 Tory DK responders.
Looking back I should have expected that. France can be very unmotivated at times - saving themselves for the big matches (especially England) and just going through the motions for the other games.
But NZ are usually ruthless and clinical - will compete for everything.
The more interesting games start on Saturday
Meanwhile both the Tories prison hulk and Rwanda plans have completely failed.
Banging on about their own failures isn't likely to help Sunak.
Germany currently is saying it wont take any more migrants and yesterday Italy got hammered with a huge number of illegals - 6000 in a day .
The UK will just end up a dumping ground since the EU cant cope.
Try looking at the total mess the EU is in re migration and then explain to me why we would want to jump in to it.
EU countries are increasingly talking about a Rwanda type solution, even as Starmer explicitly rules that out for the UK. How does he square that circle? “Come to the UK we won’t send you to Rwanda, unlike the EU” is not a brilliant message to put out there
I reckon the EU will have to try *something like* Rwanda - as hard right governments are elected across the bloc - because the only alternative after that is simply turning the boats away and letting them drown, which voters (understandably) cannot stomach; but neither are these huge waves of migrants sustainable as things stand
There does come a point where it becomes a denial of reality though.
Starmers proposal is pure nonsense which will simply lead to further bad relations with the EU,
The UK needs to stop griping and sort its problem out by itself.
If the whole EU can find some remote but safe island to send all these people to (much more likely given the size of the EU) what would you say? Would it suddenly become “acceptable”?
None of that would mean he's not on course to win. It will just reinforce his caution.
You clearly havent understood how the EU works
There was a similar (and rather more widespread) 'campaign' to make DeSantis the GOP nominee several months ago. It went nowhere.
The party itself seems to be making no such moves, for now.
And the idea of attempting to do some sort of deal with the EU isn't entirely daft - but it's a waste of his breath going into it now.
It is you who does not understand how the EU works.
It is a fact that 1,400 have arrived. It is a fact that 3 ships the size of the Bibby Poxdeath would be needed - it's called "adding". How is pointing that out little englanderism?
If you put a gun to my head I'd probably vote Lib Dem next time (so long as the candidate isn't a NIMBY) but if the Lib Dem is a NIMBY then I'd be more likely to vote for Starmer's Labour than Sunak's Tories.
Actually processing applications in reasonable time may help reduce the number undocumented.
But we can't intern them. We can't process their claims. So we can't declare them illegal and deport them. Can't you see that?
I seriously doubt he'd do any such thing.
Poland's President Andrzej Duda says he is awaiting results of an investigation into allegations that Polish consulates sold a quarter of a million work visas to migrants from Asia and Africa for thousands of dollars
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/cash-visas-scandal-hits-polands-strongly-anti-migration-103191137
The problem the Democrats have with Biden is that, while usually they should benefit from voters voting against Trump, that is largely negated because of the widespread perception that a vote in 2024 for Biden is really a vote for President Harris and not many voters are keen on that. So both parties have a problem when it comes to the 'people voting against X' issue.
“Germany 'wants EU to adopt 'Rwanda-style' migrant system with asylum seekers deported - similar to Britain's proposed scheme'”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12176903/Germany-wants-EU-adopt-Rwanda-style-migrant-system.html
We could avoid 'nasty' policies like this if we replaced a system based on an automatic right to asylum that's open to 8 billion people to one where we selectively invite people, as we've done with Ukraine and Hong Kong.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/14/reanimated-spiders-and-smart-toilets-triumph-at-ig-nobel-prizes
'Focusing on the other end of the digestive system, this year’s Ig Nobel prize for public health was awarded to researchers for the development of a smart toilet that uses various technologies to monitor human waste for signs of disease and an anal-print sensor as part of its system to identify the user.
The award for medicine went to researchers who used cadavers to explore whether each of an individual’s nostrils contains an equal number of hairs, while the communication prize was scooped by scientists who have conducted investigations, including neuroimaging analyses, into people who are expert at speaking backwards.
Elsewhere, the literature prize went to researchers exploring the peculiar feeling that can arise when the same word is repeatedly written – a phenomenon they say is an example of “jamais vu”, whereby people find the familiar to be unfamiliar – while the prize for physics went to researchers who discovered that the sexual activity of anchovies, which gather at night off the Galician coast to spawn, can create small whirls that mix different layers of water in the oceans.'
Some interesting stuff - and deeper than the uninformed viewer might think: for instance, those anchovies could be bringing up nutrient-rich deep water to the photosynthetic zone at the surface. Which has interesting implications as they'd be laying their planktonic eggs into that same water, I should think.