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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » So were there really shy Kippers?

Though every single phone poll underestimated UKIP, it was within an acceptable amount, and the largest errors were from the online polls from Panelbase and Survation, who overestimated UKIP by 3%.
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Arent both of these within MOE?
Another possibility would be that there were more Kippers out there than the polls found, but some of them switched at the last minute, like Lib and Lab VI.
Yes the UKIP vote was about right, at least with MoE for most polls. But that was about all they did get right, they missed the Con and Lab votes by a long way, turning a very hung Parliament into a clear result.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3075157/Yes-Ed-DID-spend-money-say-sorry-Miliband-explain-Labour-lost-badly-writes-former-minister-FRANK-FIELD.html
I guess this means new legislation that has to go through the Lords etc...
@MrDuttonPeabody: Comment Is Free has become a wailing sandpaper circle jerk of ambitious Labour MP's who were fine with the strategy until Thursday.
EDIT: how about i read previous comments first!
Nick Cohen in the Guardian seems to be the closest one to sane that I've found so far:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/09/labour-left-miliband-hating-english
An honourable mention to Frank Field in the MoS too, linked below.
They have to pay for Ed's gravestone somehow
Labour’s leadership of former special advisers does not look like the people it wants to represent and does not look as if it likes the look of them either. In this, it is typical of the wider educated left in England, which almost alone in the world, makes a virtue of denigrating its own people.
The universities, left press, and the arts characterise the English middle-class as Mail-reading misers, who are sexist, racist and homophobic to boot. Meanwhile, they characterise the white working class as lardy Sun-reading slobs, who are, since you asked, also sexist, racist and homophobic. The national history is reduced to one long imperial crime, and the notion that the English are not such a bad bunch with many strong radical traditions worth preserving is rejected as risibly complacent. So tainted and untrustworthy are they that they must be told what they can say and how they should behave.
In the next Parliament, we will address the unfairness of the current Parliamentary boundaries, reduce the number of MPs to 600 to cut the cost of politics and make votes
of more equal value. We will implement the boundary reforms that Parliament has already approved and make them apply automatically once the Boundary Commission reports in 2018.
"The English are a race not worth saving"
Jack Straw , Labour Party
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32677341
Nicola is also on, presumably to explain why she failed to lock the Tories out of Downing Street and how she won't win votes against a majority government. Or not.
Liz Kendal has to wait until 1:30...
...and gets Andrew Neil.
Scotand, England & Wales excl. London, London.
If we do England & Wales excl. London then PC has to be estimated in. Better still have Wales separate.
I still have not seen London total votes figure yet. The previous BBC Election sites was so much better.
Frank Field is a bit too old for a leadership challenge, and unfortunately for Labour, he's not mainstream. I stopped voting Labour in the late nineties but I'd happily return if he were leader. He will never be.
He'd be an interesting leader candidate for Ukip, though.
Ipsos MORI: C 36, L 35, LD 8, UKIP 11, GRN 5, OTH 5
Result: C 37.8, L 31.2, LD 8.1, UKIP 12.9, GRN 3.8, OTH 6.3
Rounded: C 38, L 31, LD 8, UKIP 13, GRN 4, OTH 6
Variance: C -2, L +4, LD -, UKIP -2, GRN +1, OTH -1
And this was the best poll of the bunch.
There was only one poll in the whole campaign which reflected the true Tory/Lab gap (ICM/Guardian) which was dismissed as an outlier. ICM should have trusted their model rather than conformed to YouGov's static garbage.
I hope this is the death of daily polls. YouGov's panel is nowhere near large enough to warrant a daily poll, they ask too many people the same questions that their answers become metronomic after a while and because of their overwhelming volume other pollsters seemed wary of stepping out of line. The blame for the great polling failure lies with YouGov and their paymaster, News Corp.
But what do I know. I would no more live in suburban England than I would put out my own eyes. (I can't live in the countryside - I have grand mal and so am not allowed to drive.
And everyone I know is either a graduate or a member of an ethnic minority - except my son.
Embarrassing scenes unfolded at Broxtowe Borough Council on Friday when two uncounted ballot boxes were discovered
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/embarrassing-scenes-bungling-council-bosses-5665689?ICID=FB_mirror_main
[BBC editorial meeting] The Tories have had a brilliant night. Who can we get to say bad things about it?
I would be very interested to see if it was UKIP > Con/Lab > UKIP or Lab > Con that did it, and how many LD > Lab there really were.
I seem to remember they were very proud of increasing party membership over the last couple of years. Do we know the drivers of this? As it is purported to be one member one vote analysis would be interesting.
The Conservatives had a stroke of luck post Indyref. I'm afraid Ed Miliband didn't really scare enough voters Salmond and Sturgeon on the other hand were guaranteed to give people sleepless nights if they held the balance of power.
Only saying.....
"Balls deep in ermine"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7zjeSkXqVU&src_vid=EFVwyTmFzq4&feature=iv&annotation_id=5218a503-0-2cf5-956a-47d7b3a8fdc
;-)
Bliss :-)
It is mainly in Wales there are smaller seats, but now Conservatives hold 11 of the Welsh seats, up from 8 last time and 3 in 2005, so suddenly this does not look so bad either. The real danger for the Conservatives now is that if they are painted as anti-Welsh, they may be locked out again: this is basically what happened in Scotland, and you can bet that Plaid Cymru, Labour and the LibDems would do their best to portray any seat reduction as anti-Welsh. Since independence for Wales is not viable, it might be decided that a small Welsh over-representation at Westminster is still justified.
My switching model had two fundamentally wrong assumptions:
a) it assumed that 90% of 2010 LD voters would continue to vote LD in LD seats (but only 25% would stick with the LDs in none LD seats).
b) it assumed that UKIP would get 16% of 2010 Con voters and 8% of 2010 Lab voters.
If I change the assumptions to
a) only 70% of 2010 LD voters continued to vote LD in LD seats (i.e. a much bigger "leakage")
b) UKIP gets only 8% of 2010 Con voters but 16% of 2010 voters (i.e. a reversal of the makeup of UKIP's vote so that it is mainly ex Lab)
then the model is almost spot on:
Con 228 Lab 230 LD 11 SNP 57.
If this is right, then the Tories managed to get many blue Kippers to vote Tory, but Lab totally failed to attract back the red kippers who were also larger in number.
The data tables should shed some light on this hypothesis.
PS My model still doesn't totally explain some London seats e.g. Twickenham where it is clear that many ex-LDs voted Tory. Could this be the mansion tax effect?
Labour will have over for years to become established and fill in the inherited blank sheet of paper. Tory will be able to select a fresh face for 2020 who could be selected as the best person to beat a known Labour opponent.
Given the unlikely situation that the Tory selection is done well without ripping the party apart, I'm not sure who is in the better position.
Look at the number of views for what are mainly US-style attack ads on the Conservative Party Youtube channel (numbers from a day or two ago when I first posted them).
14,856 views Salmond Alert 0:25
53,402 views Alex Salmond: "I'm writing the Labour Party budget" 0:29
61,966 views David Cameron: Vote Conservative on Thursday 1:58
67,014 views David Cameron: Vote Conservative today 0:49
84,380 views Our note to you: let's keep going (Labour left "no more money") 1:45
88,876 views Don't risk it with Ed Miliband and the SNP 0:14
89,097 views The SNP propping up Ed Miliband: you'll pay for it 0:19
174,548 views What type of country do we want to be? 2:41
420,080 views It's working - don't let them wreck it. Vote Conservative on Thursday. 2:46
Scottish Labour has spent the last 3 elections fighting the wrong enemy.
The much higher levels of approval for leadership and economic competence crystallised in this way and persuaded the undecided that it was safer to stay with people who had done quite well and knew what they were doing.
In my opinion the only time in my adult life time this has not been a major problem for Labour was when Blair and (incredibly with hindsight) Brown worked so hard to assure the City, business and indirectly the people that they could be trusted with the economy in 1997. They kept that up for a decade and dominated UK politics as a result.
Ed, in contrast, consistently came across as anti business. His attacks on fat cats and millionaires seemed an attack on aspiration and far more importantly made people wonder if he could make a success of the economy. He simply had no interest in the detail of making money rather than spending it.
For me, this makes it as plain as a pikestaff where Labour has to go next. They need leadership which is not tainted with failures of Brown; who, like Mandelson, is extremely relaxed about people getting filthy rich and who want to concentrate at least as much on making money as spending it.
There is much to do in this area. Blair went on about education, education, education but it took a right wing radical like Gove to really attack the way that children from poorer families are so badly treated by our educational establishment. One of the consequences of this failure is very poor productivity and the consequence of that is poverty wages. The last government had some success in addressing our fiscal crisis (although there is a lot more to do) but very, very little success in addressing our productivity problems and our chronic trade deficit. Our failures in these areas mean poor people remain poor.
For me, this makes it fairly obvious that Chuka Umunna is the obvious candidate for the next leader. He has already spoken well on this area. It also means the next leader needs to get to work developing a program of government addressing these problems. No more blank sheets of paper.
The minister said Clegg would be nominated for a role at the UN if he wanted one, but that he might reject a “bauble” from his former coalition partners.
He added: “There’s a lot of interest in and sympathy towards Danny. He doesn’t want to go into the Lords. Whether in the public or private sector, there would be a place where he could do well and make a difference."
By coincidence IPSOS Mori were conductng an exit poll at the polling station I was telling at in Barnes (Richmond Park). Their method was to pick people exiting the polling station (I think using random number tables) and ask them to fill in a ballot paper similar to the one they had just filled in, and post it in a dummy ballot box. It was a secret poll and they were asked for no other information. I don't know how they could produce data tables on this basis.
I was told that they were conducting the exit polls at 139 different polling stations in the UK, most of them identical to the ones used in 2010 so they could analyse any shifts. Maybe this analysis might produce some useful switching data?
The polling station I was at, sporting an LD rosette, was in an ex Council estate (council houses now worth much more than £1m each though many with the original working class owners). In previous years this was full of Labour tactical voters for LDs. This time, judging by the reaction to myself and the Tory teller beside me with a big blue rosette, many of the voters at this polling station were Lab or UKIP. Some openly said they were voting UKIP. Others told me to eff off. NB Richmond Park overall did not get a large UKIP vote. It is not natural Labour territory.
Apart from the obvious organizational things, Labour local authorities need to start thinking up controversial things to have referendums about. It doesn't matter what, anything that riles people up. Supermarkets? Jeremy Clarkson?
It was Liam Byrne wot won it. The week before polling, the attack had been SNP. That softened up a lot of voters. The final week was delivery of a glossy leaflet - comparing where we were 5 years ago - "there is no money" - versus where we are today, one of the strongest economies in the world. It was the PERFECT encapsulation of Labour's weakness.
Liam Byrne may have cost Labour 20 seats. Maybe more.
F1: my pre-race thoughts, including a tip, are up here:
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/spain-pre-race.html
Wales is the most over-represented part of the UK at Westminster. From memory England and NI return one MP per 100k population in Wales it's 86k.
Any justifiable reason why this should be ?
Apart from Labour gerrymandering.
Another example of that is that the idea that the next Labour leader would want Ed in his next shadow cabinet or indeed anywhere near him is patently absurd.