Although her U-turn over Heathrow would still cause problems…

Labour candidate for GE2017 is Cate Tuitt.

Having initially taken a principled stand to leave the tories, Goldsmith has just higlighted the careerism of his move to rejoin so soon. I expect that to play badly, along with ANDREW111’s point about May’s tories being a “coalition of chaos” on their own. Also, with only 4.2% of kippers last time, they won’t attract many votes from other parties. I predict that this seat will see the tory share drop (from 2015) more than anywhere else in the country. The wind is in the right direction for the libdems, especially with no Green candidate.

However; this isn’t a by election, and the 39% chasm in 2015 just looks too big to me.

Prediction:

Goldsmith: 48
Olney: 43
Labour: 7
UKIP: 2

I know predictions like that are not very scientific, but if that was the result, it would of course highlight the wisdom of Labour joining the Progressive Alliance.

The difficulty with the Progressive Alliance is the assumption that the views of party leaders and membership on the one hand and party voters on the other hand are pretty much identical. But 32% of LD voters were for Leave and, bizarrely, 5% of UKIP were for Remain. The West Midlands Mayoral election should have been won by the Labour candidate as there was a clear ‘Progressive’ majority on first preference votes. But that didn’t happen. On another post someone has calculated that LD second preference votes only split 2/3rd to 1/3rd in favour of the Labour. Admittedly a lot of second preference votes were wasted, being given to other minor parties, and the Tory clearly had an appeal beyond the core Tory vote. Nonetheless it is possible to over hype the Progressive majorit, especially when the tide is running so firmly in the Tories’ direction.

I carried out a straw phone poll over the week-end and it would appear the LD will hold on to this seat, the result I found was;
CON 43%
LAB 5%
LD 50%
UKIP 2%

My uncle lives in this seat. He’s always voted green but this time hell hold his nose and vote LD. Wouldn’t think hed be the only one.

How many people did you call in your straw poll, Paul?

Let’s not forget how accurate Paul Way’s straw polls were in 2015.

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/2015guide/rossskyeandlochaber/comment-page-6/#comments

PAUL WAY
Did a straw phone poll for this seat at the weekend, contacted 15 votes from each of the following, Dingwall, Portree, and Beauly, THE POLL RESULTS ARE;
LD———44%
SNP——-35%
CON——8%
LAB——-8%
OTHERSS—5%
April 6th, 2015 at 5:30 pm

In all seriousness this site belongs to YouGov and they should ban fake illegal polls from the site. Who knows, some poor mug might use them as the basis for a bet or somesuch.

I made straw phone polls and a few street straw polls in 2015. I am first to accept not all were correct but about 95% were correct. I won’t have as much time to do as many straw phone polls this year but I hope to get about 18 seats straw polled and a couple of visits to certain seats in the next two weeks to carry out street straw polls.
I hope to include 1 from N.Ireland, 2 or 3 from both Scotland and Wales and about a dozen English seats. As soon as I complete each I’ll put up the results.

Thanks Paul 🙂 🙂

”I carried out a straw phone poll over the week-end and it would appear the LD will hold on to this seat, the result I found was”

How many voters did you survey? If it was only a handful the margin of error is huge and basically 50-43 split is too close to call.

Plus did you control for vote last time, age, class etc.?

90% of people will slam the phone down and/or tell him to f-off. So to get 30 bona fide responses he needs to make 300 calls. And to get them he needs to call at least double the amount of numbers as at least half aren’t in or won’t answer. 600 phone calls for a worthless sample of 30? Expensive and illegal, under nuisance phone call legislation. Surely you can’t believe he’s telling the truth guys…a more obvious pile of horseshit you won’t find on here. As I said, shame on YouGov for not deleting fake polls from here, that is against the polling council guidelines I believe.

@ Paul Way

“…about 95% were correct”

No they weren’t. Your Ross Skye and Lochaber ‘poll’ was 21% out, and here’s another where the margin between the parties finishing first and second in the last GE was out by 20% (Greens getting 27%, as opposed to 6%).

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/2015guide/bristolwest/comment-page-9/#comments

Don’t feed the troll mate

Ignore Paul Way. Hemmelig is right. Just let him be and it’ll go away when it gets bored.

Actually, in spite of apparent lack of Science it did tickle me greatly that a lot of Paul Way’s ‘straw polls’ were just as / more accurate (or no more inaccurate) than a lot of posters’ strongly made predictions / assertions on here.

Some were way out, as has been pointed out, but some were much closer to the result that most people were saying. And at the end of the day, it was a lot cheaper than Ashcroft’s equally / more inaccurate constituency polls outside of Scotland! – so if you want someone to blame for wasting money on bets, blame Ashcroft.

Paul is harmless, not a troll. I find it very amusing. Also, for those of you inclined to take it too seriously still, please note that his predictions are not favourable in one direction / biased towards anyone, they are all over the place.

Us conceited ‘experts’ as we like to think, need to take a chill pill. Paul’s not posting 100 times a day (he couldn’t get that many phone calls done!), and you don’t have to take any notice of his tiny number of posts if you don’t want to. 🙂

HH: “90% of people will slam the phone down and/or tell him to f-off.” I find that assessment incredible. Surely it would be a minority? Asking seriously as I believe that the response rates for polls are around only 35-45% and some can be as low as 20%.

Response rates for cold calls are very low, even for reputable pollsters.

Michael Crick reports that Sarah Olney has been referred to the Met over election expenses, over an alleged overspend of between £5,157 & £15,414.

Unlikely to have an impact.

There was a difference of 18,000 in turnout between GE2015 and the BE 2016 here. I think that a lot would gave been Goldsmith abstained. This along with less tactical voting by Labour voters and no UKIP standing means for me it’s a relatively comfortable win for CON.

Zac Goldsmith has won by 45 votes.

I thought this was a credible performance by Sarah Olney given the far higher turnout compared to the by-election and the general opinion (expressed at great length above) that this seat is naturally Conservative – post 1997 boundary changes – and getting more so.

Not for the first time in this neck of the woods, the number of Labour core voters – 5,773 – far exceeded the Conservative majority.

Given Goldsmith’s majority over Olney, think it’ll be one where Labour supporters would be fine voting tactically at the next election. Ditto St Ives.

I think most of them already did vote tactically at this election.

Sarah Olney is apparently being lined up as Vince Cable’s chief of staff.

A poor choice IMO.

It does look like the Lib Dems are rapidly shrinking into the Disgusted of South West London Party.

Its their comfort zone and echo chamber.

Can’t say I really know a lot about who else could have done the job – but I do feel uneasy about this trend for defeated MPs getting behind-the-scenes roles. People should be able to vote their representatives out.