Evidence on the Tory Strategy of Targeting Marginals

Can be found here. In short, it looks to be successful. Longer, the BPIX poll that was released yesterday is being touted as having a large enough sample size to say something about the marginals that the Tories are targeting, and claims the swing in said seats is significantly higher than the national swing.

Note, this poll shows a Tory plurality of only 2% over Labour, whereas over the past several weeks YouGov has settled into a 5% to 6% range, with that one "blip" of 2% last weekend. A uniform swing would produce a C 252 / L 309 / LD 56 distribution -- in all likelihood a Labour minority government. In order to gain a plurality share of the seats, the Tories would have to take 29 additional seats off of Labour (not the Lib Dems, but Labour); to obtain an outright albeit narrow governing majority, they would need 74 seats in addition to what a uniform national swing would predict.

Unfortunately, nothing on this poll appears to be available aside from the superficial information I've discussed above. I'm especially keen to know how, and to what degree, the marginals were oversampled. While an N of 5655 is impressive for a poll of this nature, a purely random sampling would equate into an N of 8.7 for each of the 650 constituencies. Of course, they didn't sample in purely random fashion as some form of stratified sampling was certainly employed, but still, how large can the N be for the 75 or so odd marginals that the Tories are targeting?

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More on British Polling and Margins of Error

I promise that this will not be a daily habit of mine, but the Tory +2% lead poll did generate the predictable breathless excitement on these islands.

YouGov's daily tracker indeed moved back towards +6, as anticipated, at Conservative +7. Additionally, a ComRes poll was released yesterday for The Independent which places the Tory lead at +5 (37/32/19). I want to emphasize that the +2 poll released on Sunday, while at the fringes assuming a true value of +6, is still within the margin of error. It was not an outlier in a pedantic understanding of the word, which is a case three standard deviations removed from the mean.

In other words, the findings reported in the Sunday poll were not "wrong". 95% of samples will yield the true value within the error band of +/- 3%, as this was. This is why we have margins of error in the first place.

What we should focus on is not the point estimate itself, but the trend -- and the consistent trend is clearly away from the Tories and towards Labour.

Speaking of which, the +5% Tory lead reflected in The Independent's poll still yields a distribution of seats as Labour 287, Conservative 272, Liberal Democrat 59 -- assuming a uniform national swing.

UPDATE ( 3/3/10): Again as expected, Wednesday's YouGov tracker is rather consistent, at Conservative +5 (C 38 L 33 LD 16). Given the last seven to ten days of polling, this suggests a true value of support around + 6%, and if not precisely 6 (and it isn't) it's slightly below 6%.

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We May Have a Ballgame Here

Until this is held, due by June 3 (and the smart money is still on May 6 in order to coincide with the annual local elections) I will be paying more of my scant attention to the forthcoming British general election.

The latest YouGov poll, released on Sunday, has the Tory lead at a mere 2%. While Labour supporters should not get too excited, this is consistent with the trend over the past month to six weeks. Since YouGov essentially became a tracker poll on February 17, the Tory lead has been +9, +7, +8, +6, +6, +6, +6, +6, and now +2. If those +6 results reflect the true value of support at C 39, L 33, then this true value rests comfortably within the margin of error of the most recent poll. Hence, this Times column on the volatility of polling is sound advice, aside from his contention that "all polls have a margin of error of 2 points or so plus or minus"; +/- 3% is the norm due to the inefficiencies of diminishing marginal returns. This poll has an N slightly over 1400, which would place the margin of error slightly below 3%; in order to hit 2% the N would have to be around 2500.

I expect the next YouGov poll to move towards the earlier 6% lead, but the trend is clear: Labour are closing the gap for a variety of reasons (save for Gordon Brown, who still trails Cameron in head-to-head approvals). So what does either scenario mean?

If it's Tories +6, at 39 to 33, the Tories would have 293 seats, Labour 280, the Lib Dems 46.
If at +2, at 37 to 35, then it's Labour 316, Tories 256, Lib Dems 48.

Both scenarios assume a uniform national swing, which while not a completely safe assumption, is necessary in order to calculate the distribution of seats. The Tories 'ground game' strategy is to (intelligently) target the marginal constituencies at the expense of running a purely national campaign, and this may yield dividends that would warp the results expected from a uniform swing. However, even here, the Tories would come up well short if the gap is only 2%. In an analysis by Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, the Tories might realize 270 seats to Labour's 300.

What is clear in any of these calculations, be it Tories +2 or +6, due to the vagaries of the British electoral system, neither party would hit the magic 326 necessary for an outright majority. This would result in a minority government and a new election within a year.

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Labour Frets About Gordon Brown . . . Again, and Again, and . . .

Preface: I'm lucky to be writing this, as my internet connectivity at our Oregon Estate (read: two bedroom apartment in a posh suburb) is dodgy. The better half upgraded a few weeks ago, the provider dropped the ball, we've been without since 31 December, and I'm nicking bandwidth on some nearby, highly unreliable, open wifi. Upgraded access is restored here on 11 January, which conveniently is the same day I brave the upgraded security regime to fly back to England for the new term.

This latest Labour hang wringing over the leadership (and electoral suitability) of Gordon Brown has taken another ham fisted turn, as covered by the New York Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, et al. (OK, I'm sure The Sun does cover it, but first we get to read about how Cheryl Cole lost her virginity at 15, Rachel Weisz is everybody's favorite MILF, and Patrick Vieira is leaving Inter Milan for greener pastures, presumably Man City, but then it is The Sun).

I'll make this short: this is stupid. Labour's chance to ditch Brown, as I pointed out at the time, was this past June. An Alan Johnson leadership would have helped Labour, but now that Johnson instead opted to assume the cabinet portfolio of doom (i.e. the Home Office), he's in a worse position to help Labour. With Labour slowly regaining traction in the polls over the past two months or so, such that a hung parliament is not out of the question (and third place behind the Lib Dems now seems unlikely), provoking a leadership contest four to five months before an election is lunacy on the scale of Michael Foot's 1983 Labour manifesto. Stating it lightly, this does not help.

The best analysis, as is often the case, can be found at UK Polling Report. Yes, Brown is a clear drag on Labour, while Cameron is the opposite for the Tories. However, the opportunity costs involved in a leadership challenge and then election while the party ought to be busy writing its manifesto and campaigning on it in a unified (for Labour) manner are immense.

Labour had the chance to ditch the Right Honorable Dour Scot in June, and they didn't. It's too late now to do any good.

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British Party Leaders to Have Three Debates

Because apparently nobody watches the weekly PM's Question Time.

This is a good idea in general, but a bad idea for Gordon Brown and Labour. As his approval ratings are trailing those of his party, and likewise he is trailing David Cameron, I'm not sure how this will help him. Especially as a lot of his negatives are tied to his personality, not his policies.

I expect that if it adds anything to Cameron's chances (growing somewhat after having dipped for a few weeks) it will solidify and reassure the support of those who voted Labour or Lib Dem in 97, 01, and 05. The real winner here could be Nick Clegg, because a) nobody knows who the hell he is at the moment, b) like Cameron, the five people who have heard of Nick Clegg have no idea what the hell he or his party stand for, and c) he will appeal in contrast to Gordon Brown even if he fails to utter a single word all night.

I also anticipate that these debates will be of a vastly superior quality to their American inspirations, both in terms of the type of questions asked as well as the directness of the responses. But I'll miss the Palinesque moments . . .

. . . and I do look forward to the British reaction to their first ever debates, wondering how soon, and how often, some media turd will bemoan yet another Yank import sullying the culture, like Halloween and a currency that one can divide by 100.

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The Point Being Exactly What, Again?

From Oregon, I've been reading with befuddlement the noises that Gordon Brown might call an early election. Maybe it's jet lag, but it seems to me that the time to have called an early election was July 2007. Rumor has it he's considering 25 March, which is only six weeks in advance of the assumed date (to correspond with local elections in early May) and not all that far in advance of the latest possible date for an election (5 June I believe).

It's obvious that one calls an early "snap" election when it disproportionately advantages your side. For Labour in early (as opposed to mid) 2010, I can only imagine three possible scenarios that would marginally advantage Labour (as opposed to disproportionately advantage). First, they assume that the current, vague trend towards Labour will continue, but hit a ceiling. Second, they assume that things are only going to get progressively worse, and calling an election sooner will at least maintain Labour as the official opposition. Third, they assume that the Tories are not prepared for an election. Or . . . fourth . . . they know that there will be thermonuclear bad news released between 25 March and 6 May. Considering the state of the British economy, the structural problems involved and concomitant threats of the credit agencies to downgrade the rating of the state debt, this scenario is not as far-fetched as it seems.

Of course, when David Cameron hails Simon Cowell and suggests that there is something that politicians can learn from this "incredibly talented" man, perhaps it isn't too soon to call a snap election.

UPDATE: It was the Tories spreading the rumor. This makes more sense.

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