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April 12th, 2010

State of the Race for 12 April

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Blog Admin

April 12th, 2010

State of the Race for 12 April

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Posted by Chris Gilson and Patrick Dunleavy.

Latest Poll Information for 12 April

PartySky News Poll TrackingLSE Poll Tracking
Per centPer cent
Last Change12 April12 April
Labour3131
Conservatives3839
Liberal Democrats2020
Other Parties1110
Tory Lead+7+8

There is no change in Sky News’ “Poll of Polls” since Friday, with the Conservatives at 38 per cent, giving them a 7 per cent lead over Labour.  Our measure shows a slight drop for Labour to 31 per cent, and the Conservatives relatively steady on 39 per cent. The Liberal Democrats are back up to 20 per cent after a few days on 18 and 19, and the Other parties remain slightly lower than their recent 12-14 per cent on 10 per cent.

The glut of polls since last week have mostly been in the range of 30-32 per cent for Labour, and 37 to 40 per cent for the Conservatives, which is approximately where the two parties were at the beginning of March, a theme strongly stressed by Bob Worcester’s most recent blog. The Harris Interactive poll at the end of last week puts Labour on 27 per cent, but this is something of an outlier.

Interestingly, YouGov’s most recent poll has the Labour/Tory gap at 6 per cent (with the Tories on 37 per cent), which must raise some doubts about whether the Conservative lead is as great as some commentators have maintained. With the first of the televised debates being this Thursday, it will be interesting to see where these numbers go from here.

Betting odds and the Election as of 12 April

 Conservative MajorityLabour MajorityNo MajorityConservatives Most SeatsLabour Most SeatsLib Dems most Seats
Ladbrokes8/1510/115/81/85/1200/1
Betfair8/1114/17/42/1111/2219/1
William Hill4/78/113/81/74/1150/1

There have been some changes to the betting firms’ figures since last month. Odds for the Conservatives have narrowed for both Ladbrokes and William Hill, while only William Hill change their odds for a Labour majority; now slightly worse on 8/1 from 15/2. Ladbrokes and Betfair have slightly altered their hung parliament odds, but William Hill is less positive about this possibility than before, moving from a 5/4 chance of no overall majority to 13/8. All the betting companies have dropped Labour’s chances of having the most seats, and all the firms have become slightly more favourable towards the Conservatives having most seats.

It’s also worth noting that the most recent spread-betting predictions from PoliticalBetting.com at the end of March have spread bets for Commons seats at only just inside or outside hung parliament level, with the Conservatives in the 319 – 331 seat range (326+ needed for a majority), and Labour on 231-239. Spread betters are thus punting on a Tory majority or near-majority, and setting low expectations for Labour seats. We have discussed three possible reasons for this.

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This work by British Politics and Policy at LSE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.