Thursday's TV debate analysed

Nearly 20% of the YouGov respondents watched Thursday’s programme, whereas around only 5% of the public actually watched the programme so this might be what may be somewhat over amplifying Ed’s performance and the Labour lead.

What does indicate that is a good poll for Labour and Ed is the relative improvement in Ed’s ratings, he’s gone from a net minus 46% at the end of February, to net minus 29% today. In the same time frame David Cameron’s ratings have improved by 4% and Nick Clegg’s have improved by 12%. Since last week, Cameron, Miliband and Clegg’s ratings have improved by 3%, 10% and 7% respectively.

Peter Kellner, writing in the  Sunday Times says of this poll

   [It] indicates a swing of more than six percentage points from Conservative to Labour across England and Wales. If this were repeated in every constituency, Labour would gain enough seats to come close to an outright majority, even if it lost badly in Scotland. Labour would end up with 314 MPs and the Tories 251, followed by the Scottish National party (48) and Liberal Democrats (16).

If this poll is a harbinger of the election result, then the 16.5 on a Labour majority on Betfair needs to snapped up PDQ. The next few phone polls with their random selection should give us a better idea. But with three more debates/events, of which Ed is the only attendee, Labour must be feeling confident if he can replicate this kind of win with those who watch the programmes.

Read this on Peter Hitchens blog. Yep, the Peter Hitchens of Daily Mail fame:

If 'bogey man' Ed did this, we'd all be very sniffy...


Have you ever wondered what happened to the vegetables so wantonly sacrificed in the BBC’s carefully stage-managed TV advertisement for David Cameron?

Keen-eyed viewers will have noted the Prime Minister twice giving his nose a jolly good wipe with the back of his hand, as he chopped away at his groceries. Just imagine what would have happened to Ed Miliband if he’d done that: action replays and front-page pictures for days.

But Ed is a target, and Dave isn’t.

So I very much hope that the poor vegetables, so unhygienically treated, ended in the slop bucket, rather than being fed to the Camerons’ innocent children.

But there were other vegetables present. What did the BBC reporter, James Landale, think he was doing, joining in this shameless performance by subserviently tending to a lettuce? He might as well have knelt and done up Mr Cameron’s shoes for him, or some other fagging duty.

If Tory High Command want to make a TV commercial for their leader, in which he pretends to be the normal bloke he most certainly is not (normal people don’t become Prime Ministers, trust me) , then good luck to them. But the BBC should play no part in such fictions.

The kitchen in which they stood was not a normal kitchen in a normal home. Leave aside the armed guards outside. Can we doubt that every action was choreographed, and that every object in it was carefully placed to promote an image? What’s more, you and I pretty much paid for it.

For nearly eight years, in a piece of cheek still widely unknown to the public, the far-from-poor Camerons claimed £1,700 a month, tax-free, in Parliamentary expenses to pay the mortgage interest on this, their Oxfordshire village home.

This made Mr Cameron (who had another home only 70 miles away) one of the highest claimers of housing expenses in Parliament. While it’s good to see inside the house the taxpayer provided, at last, mightn’t a question on this subject have been in order, under the circumstances? Instead the First Lord of the Treasury was asked if it was a handicap to be posh.

Meanwhile, over on the equally impartial Channel 4 and Sky, Jeremy Paxman got clean away with asking Ed Miliband the insulting and patronising question: ‘Are you all right, Ed?’

I was pleased to see that Mr Miliband gave as good as he got. But is this what politics has come to? It seems so.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/03/is-slippery-salmond-secretly-trying-to-get-dave-elected.html

You could have, as the saying goes, knocked me over with a feather!

UPDATE: ICM tables are now up here (thanks to that fine man Tom Clark!). As expected, perceptions of who won fell pretty much along the lines of pre-existing party support – 84% of Conservatives thought Cameron won, 74% of Labour supporters thought Miliband won, Lib Dems were split, Ukippers thought Cameron won, Greens thought Miliband won. Note that while the sample was demographically and politically weighted to be nationally representative, it was a very heavily Labour sample in terms of current voting intention: the pre-debate voting intentions of the sample had an 10% Labour lead (thus are the difficulties of doing things like this – people who watch programmes like this are different from your average voter!)



The YouGov/Sunday Times poll this morning showed a four point Labour lead, interpreted in some quarters of the commentariat as showing an advance for Labour after the Paxman interviews. As ever, it was only one poll. Now we have a second post-Paxman poll, a ComRes telephone poll for the Daily Mail & ITV, and this one shows the complete opposite – CON 36%(+1), LAB 32%(-3), LDEM 9%(+1), UKIP 12%(+2), GRN 5%(-2) (tabs).

If the four point Labour lead in this morning’s YouGov poll equalled their best this year, this poll is the biggest Conservative lead ComRes have delivered since 2010. Where YouGov showed Miliband’s ratings improving, ComRes show Cameron widening his lead as best Prime Minister.

There is no great mystery here, I expect we’re just seeing normal sample variation. I said this morning we needed to wait for some more polling to have any idea whether the Paxman interviews had really had any effect, whether there was a consistent trend. With two polls now showing movement in opposition directions there certainly isn’t yet. It could still be that the rest of the week’s polls show a similar movement to YouGov and the ComRes poll was just a blip… or that the rest of the week’s polls show a similar movement to ComRes and the YouGov poll was a blip. I’ve a sneaky suspicion though that we’ve just happened to see two outliers in opposite directions, and we’re going to see lots of polls showing no clear movement. Time will tell.


http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/


I love watching the left wing extremists get over excited and fail to understand polls.

Brasidas wrote:UPDATE: ICM tables are now up here (thanks to that fine man Tom Clark!). As expected, perceptions of who won fell pretty much along the lines of pre-existing party support – 84% of Conservatives thought Cameron won, 74% of Labour supporters thought Miliband won, Lib Dems were split, Ukippers thought Cameron won, Greens thought Miliband won. Note that while the sample was demographically and politically weighted to be nationally representative, it was a very heavily Labour sample in terms of current voting intention: the pre-debate voting intentions of the sample had an 10% Labour lead (thus are the difficulties of doing things like this – people who watch programmes like this are different from your average voter!)



The YouGov/Sunday Times poll this morning showed a four point Labour lead, interpreted in some quarters of the commentariat as showing an advance for Labour after the Paxman interviews. As ever, it was only one poll. Now we have a second post-Paxman poll, a ComRes telephone poll for the Daily Mail & ITV, and this one shows the complete opposite – CON 36%(+1), LAB 32%(-3), LDEM 9%(+1), UKIP 12%(+2), GRN 5%(-2) (tabs).

If the four point Labour lead in this morning’s YouGov poll equalled their best this year, this poll is the biggest Conservative lead ComRes have delivered since 2010. Where YouGov showed Miliband’s ratings improving, ComRes show Cameron widening his lead as best Prime Minister.

There is no great mystery here, I expect we’re just seeing normal sample variation. I said this morning we needed to wait for some more polling to have any idea whether the Paxman interviews had really had any effect, whether there was a consistent trend. With two polls now showing movement in opposition directions there certainly isn’t yet. It could still be that the rest of the week’s polls show a similar movement to YouGov and the ComRes poll was just a blip… or that the rest of the week’s polls show a similar movement to ComRes and the YouGov poll was a blip. I’ve a sneaky suspicion though that we’ve just happened to see two outliers in opposite directions, and we’re going to see lots of polls showing no clear movement. Time will tell.


http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/


I love watching the left wing extremists get over excited and fail to understand polls.

Well lets face it Didge it was you that started the ball rolling on this one when you gleefully put up a thread about Cameron winning the TV debate. What your seeing here is a deeper analysis of the results that shows it wasn't quite the victory for Cameron than you thought it was.

Here's your thread

http://www.newsfixboard.com/t8681-election-tv-debate-david-cameron-wins-says-snap-poll

Hope that clears it up for you.

It was still a victory and it shows how desperate the left are at trying to skew the facts.

Brasidas wrote: It was still a victory and it shows how desperate the left are at trying to skew the facts.

Point made. Thanks mate, that made my day

CYA later

Irn Bru wrote:

Brasidas wrote: It was still a victory and it shows how desperate the left are at trying to skew the facts.

Point made. Thanks mate, that made my day

CYA later

No worries have a good day