Stephen Bush: The professional negligence election continues to deliver, with the latest salvo being “crowdfunding enough to hire an extra organiser for Jeremy Corbyn to instead commission a (notoriously unreliable!) constituency poll that then shows Jeremy Corbyn losing”.

The professional negligence election continues to deliver, with the latest salvo being “crowdfunding enough to hire an extra organiser for Jeremy Corbyn to instead commission a (notoriously unreliable!) constituency poll that then shows Jeremy Corbyn losing”.

Stephen I'm afraid to say that I can't agree with this because Stats for Lefties forking out a load of donations for this poll is very, VERY funny and entirely in keeping with their professionalism.

It’s hilarious - and actually below my low opinion of Folan’s work that they would go “commission a notoriously unreliable polling method in which my preferred candidate’s route to victory has always been to poll around 33 to 35 per cent - what could go wrong?”

The funniest part is that they and the usual suspects are digging into the cross tabs to insist it actual shows Corbyn winning.

Are they? EF seems to have had a consistent position throughout, which is 'I'm not convinced by the boosters from either side, let's see.' And if they'd crowdfunded a campaign worker for Corbyn, they'd have been yeeted from GPEW.

They have an exceptional record of massaging numbers to try and prove things like "Corbyn is the UK's favourite politician".

The funny thing is Corbyn losing would be a tonic to the left of the PLP, a jolt that says "shit wait we're in power now, let's play the ball and not the man" - and on a fair few issues that would be handy for the country. Good luck making that argument though

Wholly agree.

Agree entirely - it'd be a good thing for the left in general by getting them to move on. Maybe snap them out of the self immolation spiral they're in

Lots to gain if they learn quickly and the Libs do well. If both happen, I think there's no way the two child cap still exists in October, for instance

I met some of Corbyn’s campaigners on the doorstep yesterday. I would say that compared to the official Labour campaigners they were younger and, how can I put this, *dappy*.

Their campaign office is just down from the Banksy Tree and instead of a sign up outside it, or a poster in the window, it has a load of stickers above the door. It looks like a campaign run by students for the Ents Secretary. He is not currently coming over as someone grownups would vote for.

Some would say he never did.

There is a type of politicians who appeal particularly to young inexperienced voters and they're often quite sus (eg Korwin-Mikke in Poland).

this is a work of art

An early twentieth century example of the portrayal of inevitability and unwarranted hope.

This one has particularly amused me ill admit. Particularly the 'it's all okay!' Write up from Leftie Stats

Serious question. Do you think the avg. of 41/20/12/15/5 is now baked in (if not the batter ready to go into the oven) or are the polls monumentally wrong?

The wider data strongly supports the polls not being wrong: party behaviour, constituency polls, random sampling polls etc. + they've had a very good record through this Parliament including in the locals 2 months ago. So unlikely they're wrong.

There is quite a lot of variation in them - largely due to turnout modelling, but I'd be surprised if the result falls outside their basic bounds

(Basically were talking about whether it's 1997 or a total smashed ans sub 100 seats. I'm still betting around 120 seats but that's largely intellectual cowardance: if I was being entirely true to the data I'd be betting on sub 100... but my mind rebels at it)

Gold standard Ispos just come in with that

Yeah, IPSOS and survation are arguably the two with the best track record - and using phone polling. And they've come in with 23% leads.

Also as you say: Rishi Sunak isn’t visiting *Suffolk Coastal* for his health!

Often worth watching where members of the Shadow Cabinet are as well. And a lot of those visits have been as *chuckles I'm in danger* as 'Michael Gove campaigned in Chesterfield today' was in 2019. (Yes it was held in the end, but it was indicative...)

Has anyone worked out the lowest majority he has visited ?

Yep so we are looking at wipeout terrority

We are. I can't quite believe it'll be -100 but that is more me being disbelieving than the data. Also: we've kept saying they can't go lower and. . They do

I also note that Deltapoll was ominously stable in 2019. And has been this election as well.

If you go on who and what methods were accurate in 2019 (which doesn't always carry over) its properly death zone for the Tories.

A lot of it is baked in by this stage because, er, a lot of people have already voted by post.

Also - the polls weren’t wrong *in May*, so it is unlikely that they will become so in July. Probably the Tories are understated by three points or so in most polls but, well, they’re doing so badly that doesn’t matter.

It's so typical Sunak announced the GE for July. If he'd set the GE for the same day as the May local elections the Tories would have benefitted from their higher GE turnout and won more councillors/councils. But Sunak didn't do that because he can never do anything right

Indeed. One reason we should all have been betting on a July election it is far and away the date with the least to recommend it, so of course he was gonna land there.

I wrote an article on the premise that if he didn't go for May he'd get sucked into going for January, that literally had whole passage which handwaved away June/July as clearly insane and stupid. It's as if I hadn't been following the man's bizarre decision-making!

Ha ha! Yes, and it's classic Cipolla's third law of stupidity - a stupid person causing losses to others without any benefit to himself. What a fool.

i put £10 on July and on January, based mostly on your reporting I figured he'd either be forced into it post locals or dither until January. Was hoping for Jan because I'd have won 3x as much...

Yeah, it's like in any given scenario, he will pick the wrong choice 100% of the time.

If general patterns from then hold, lop a few Ref points off and give them to Con, but that's it and the big picture does not alter.

Isn't the spending limit for a single constituency really quite low? I'd have thought he'd have easily reached it already. Or are rules different for independents? Not that I'm suggesting a constituency poll is a good way to spend any money at all.

Was c. 17k but Tories doubled it. Independents have the same limit but a worse time of it because they can't put some of it under national expenditure, which is unlimited.

Yeah - I doubt that he has spent anything like the limits (because I would have been sent more Facebook ads, for instance) but in general one of many stupid and deliberate unfairnesses in our system is that the national limit of £54k x the number of seats you are contesting is designed to be gamed!

(Clegg losing in 2017 a big part of this IMO - in 2015 there was an awful lot of “vote Lib Dems, led by Clegg” across Sheffield, which of course helped him in Hallam.)

Yeah the current system is criminally unfair to independents

Obviously since the parties control the rules it will never be changed.

Presumably this will affect support for Corbyn both directly and also indirectly by discouraging activists from volunteering and/or donating, but tbh weren’t his chances of winning a bit overblown anyway?

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