Follow Stephan on Twitter. Two or three unspectacular budgets from now the Conservatives could find themselves with five more years of power. It's usually worth betting on mean reversion (I can reach Olympian levels of dullness on this subject, but the fact is hedge funds the world over make plenty of money that way). Over […]
Follow Stephan on Twitter. At last weekend's ConservativeHome conference (write-ups here), the stated focus was how to achieve an absolute majority for the Conservatives in 2015. But in truth, no-one believed it; they were really discussing 2020. The fact is that governments only add votes in very rare circumstances, and we are not in those […]
Follow Stephan on Twitter. The two biggest obstacles to winning elections are intellectual laziness and physical laziness. It's inherently very hard for the Conservatives to win an outright majority given the current state of the economy, the existing constituency boundaries, the poor condition of the campaigning machine, the trickiness of coalition, the absence of any […]
Follow Stephan on Twitter. Politics in Britain today is still about gurus and wannabe gurus; it ought to be about geeks. The edge in today's game is to be had in campaigning by numbers – it's data that will let you maximise your vote, it's data incorporated into your mobilisation machine that could take Cameron […]
Stephan is CEO of YouGov. Follow Stephan on Twitter. Sometimes polling is misleading rather than illuminative – especially if one is too desperate to find evidence for one’s own point of view. Consider this question, which ComRes ran last week: “Agree or Disagree: I would have considered voting Conservative at the next election but will […]
Stephan Shakespeare is Chief Executive of YouGov. Follow Stephan on Twitter. In a few hours, David Cameron will make a historic announcement that he will offer an in/out EU referendum after a period of negotiations for an improved relationship. It looks like a bold move, but it's also the safest bet: we want to feel […]
This is the second of a series of five myths and truths of polling from Stephan Shakespeare. Last week he examined the myth of The Big Swing. Follow Stephan on Twitter. One of the givens of political campaigning is that values are deeper than opinions. This may be true, but unfortunately neither is very deep. […]
In the first of a series of five myths and truths of polling Stephan Shakespeare examines the idea of The Big Swing. Follow Stephan on Twitter. As we start getting serious about the next general election, we should remind ourselves of some of the basic political realities measured or illustrated by polling. First up, and […]
"To win outright, Cameron needs a miracle" – so said my YouGov colleague Peter Kellner yesterday. How different to just one year ago. In those over-confident times I had cabinet ministers willing to bet cash they'd achieve a majority in 2015, and even my Labour friends had given up and were strategising for the election […]
Most of us share a fantasy: that really smart well-informed people meeting behind closed doors would make better decisions for the long-term national interest than a bunch of squabbling politicians grubbing for the votes of an unruly mass via our distorting media. How can childish parliamentarians playing to the gallery, booing and hissing in the […]
Everything is politics now, especially banking and technology. Business used to be able to say, 'We don't care about politics, just let us get on with building prosperity', but no longer. It's therefore no surprise that, probably for the first time, we see a top-rank political pollster taking a seat at the top table of […]
You, dear reader, if you are better informed, smarter and more thoughtful than most other people, are also likely to be more in danger of making biased judgments. That is the conclusion from a new study (‘Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot’) – see here for Jonah Lehrer’s discussion of it, ‘Why […]
Where is the political ‘centre’ of the British electorate? Two new pieces of polling evidence suggest a serious long-term challenge for the Conservatives. Exhibit 1, Last week I ran an open-ended question: “In your own words, please say what words you associate with the phrase ‘left wing’/ ‘right wing’”. The most common answers are, as […]
I wonder if there's ever been a government which didn't suffer from mid-term blues? The hard thing is working out whether the recent steep decline in the coalition's polling numbers is merely a dip or a lasting trend. There's no certain test, but one can check the full range of trackers to see if the […]
The surest way of showing you don’t really understand modern politics is to call Boris a buffoon. Not only does the word, with its overtones of stupidity, profoundly misjudge the man, it misjudges the electorate. There is nothing clownish about Boris: clowns are never winners. Yes, Boris is highly amusing, using his wit subtly to […]