The Political Tipster

Filtering recent polling data through SampleMiser gives a (small) Labour Majority. The main movement seems to be from the Lib Dems to the Tories.

Putting polling data from the YouGov poll in August 31 to the recent YouGov poll produces the following predicted vote shares: Labour 37.98% Conservatives 41.01% and Liberal Democrats 11.01%. Putting these figures into Baxter gives an electoral projection of 334 Labour seats, 288 Conservative seats and no Liberal Democrats. What is more interesting is that, apart from a fall in late September and a bulge on October 12th, the combined Liberal and Conservative shares of the votes have been around 50-52% for the last two months. This seems to suggest that the contraction of the Labour lead since the non-election was due to Lib Dems switching to the Conservatives.

Although this could suggest that a sizable proportion of Lib Dems are weak Conservatives (and as such are prepared to vote tactically for the Tories) it also suggests that even the events of the last few weeks haven’t changed the fact that Labour have moved into the high 30s. Indeed, if Labour are in this situation after an drubbing from the media, we can expect to see the government ahead of Cameron before the end of the year. Punters should use this as an opportunity to take a punt on both a 2008 election and a Labour victory.