politicalbetting.com

How will the final convention betting market play out?

After the scintillating speeches overnight from Bill Clinton and Joe Biden there’s the big rally tonight in the massive stadium in Denver and the Obama campaign must be more hopeful that their convention will end giving it the boost they had planned for.

So how is it going to affect the McCain campaign particularly the choice of VP. ? We won’t have to wait long. For at noon, local time, tomorrow at Dayton in the crucial swing state of Ohio the 72 year old Vietnam veteran will tell us so resolving the last White House betting market prior to the election on November 4th.

Like Obama’s choice this has been kept a very close secret and it might be that the final decision is only just being made today. The McCain camp will want to have kept their options open right to the end as they try to work out who would be best to fight the Obama-Biden partnership.

There’s been a lot of speculation that McCain might choose a woman and a number of names have been mentioned by pundits. Certainly it would change the media narrative and switch the focus to the McCain campaign over the weekend.

Unlike the Democratic ticket the Republican line-up has attracted nothing like the interest in the UK and betting has been much lighter - none more so than on the person who has emerged this week as a possible contender - Senator Kay Bailey from Texas. As I write just £713 has been traded on her on the Betfair exchange which is just a fraction of my possible winnings from the 40/1 bet on her I placed with Ladbrokes on Monday.

This is how “The Swamp” makes her case: “Some observers believe that if McCain chose Hutchison, the Republican senator from Texas, that could really shake up the presidential race and seize crucial convention momentum from Obama…Selecting a woman as his vice presidential pick might appear to be pandering to women upset that Hillary Clinton wasn’t selected as Obama’s running mate. But pandering often works, which is why politicians do it..It would also add a sense of historic possibilities to the Republican ticket, something none of the men being mentioned would do.”

I’ve got a sprinkling of money on the other female possibilities, including the former Miss Alaska, Sarah Palin who two years ago was elected governor.

Mitt Romney remains the favourite with the current governor of Virginia, Tim Pawlenty, also in the frame.

As I’ve said before VP nominee betting is a mugs’ game but that doesn’t stop us wanting to have a punt. Who knows what McCain is going to do? Thankfully we do not have long to wait.

Mike Smithson

Did nobody realise how McCain would respond?

It appears from the photo above (hat-tip to Drudge) that the stage for Barack Obama’s historic address tomorrow evening will be classical in design, with a facade resembling a Greek or Roman temple.

McCain’s campaign has ‘gleefully’ responded, calling it the ‘Temple of Obama’ and have sent out an email of their magazine “Audacity Watch”. This chimes with the video that they made mocking Obama’s messianic following, called ‘The One‘.

After his international tour, there was no shortage of comment accusing Obama of being less the presumptive nominee, but more the presumptuous nominee. In light of that criticism, accepting the nomination in a 70,000 seater stadium might seem a little risky, but to put him on such a stage smacks of amateurish indifference to this line of attack, which could be extremely dangerous for his chances of winning in November.

Rumour has it that John McCain will announce his VP on Friday morning, or even on Thursday evening just hours after Obama’s speech, to overshadow the Democrat’s coverage. This element, as well as the various pitfalls of accepting the nomination in this way, lead me to wonder whether Obama will see the usual ‘Convention Bounce’ of 6%. If not, cue the process stories about a campaign coming off the rails, and the media getting to savage the Obama campaign team for the first time.

Morus

REMEMBER: Check out Morus’ Denver Diary for latest updates, thoughts and impressions from the Democratic Convention week in Colorado, as well as an exclusive interview with Lord Rennard and Ed Davey MP.

A guest slot by Bob Worcester - the founder of MORI

(This is a specially adapted version for PB of an article produced by Bob Worcester for his new Vox Populi blogs on the Ipsos MORI site. The aim is to produce a monthly piece between now and the next election based on Bob’s personal experience of nearly 40 years conducting and observing polls and how they are reported)

“Let’s look at the record”, as the politicians say. Just this past month we’ve seen two polls early in August, ICM in the Sunday Express and BPIX in the Sunday Mail, both being conducted over the same few days, yet one had a 15 point lead for the Conservatives (ICM) and the other had a 24 point lead (BPIX). They can’t both be right I hear the poll pickers say.

Or can they?

Then over identical days in mid-month, 15th-17th, ICM for the Guardian had 15 point Tory lead again, while Ipsos MORI had 24, published by the Press Association. Well that proves it, doesn’t it?

Or does it?

No, it doesn’t, if you look at the share, not the lead. For polls are subject to the laws of statistics (as any statistician will tell you, if you ask them), and polls using properly designed samples, and we all do, operate within a so-called ‘confidence interval’ of plus or minus three percent for a sample of c. 1,000 people. And the four polls above, plus the three done by YouGov in between them, are all, seven out of seven, within a three point ‘margin of error’ of the average share for the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, and Others.

That’s as good as it gets folks, and if you double the sample size, you don’t improve the accuracy much. And that holds whether you’re talking about a poll in America’s 240 million potential voters, Britain’s 45 million, or Trinidad’s 1.3 million or even the Maldives’ 200,000 electorate, holding their first ever contested presidential election this coming month. Hard to believe. Yeah, I know, but that’s the way it works.

Still don’t believe me?

Take all the polls in the first quarter of 2008. There were 23 polls published by one or another of the seven pollsters making the running. The Tories? 23 out of 23 were within the three percent margin as were the Liberal Democrats. Labour? 20 out of 23, as were the collective others. So in the first quarter of this year, 93% of the 92 party shares were within the plus or minus three percent margin. And what does statistics tell us? That the +/-3% rule you can expect to work 95% of the time if done at the same time, and these 23 polls covered three months!

OK, a fluke? What about April? 92%. May 84% (not too good, shape up pollsters). June? 94% (that’s better). July? 97% (wow). August so far? 100%! Seven polls out of seven hit the average for the month (to date), the Tories at 46%, Labour 26%, Liberal Democrats 17% and Others 11% within plus or minus three percent margins.

So why oh why do most folks believe the polls are all over the place. Some folks don’t believe in them at all, any more than Quiji boards or reading tea leaves. Another reason is that most folks aren’t statisticians. Fair enough, but most of those commenting on the polls in the newspapers, on radio and television, and certainly many who comment on them in the blogs and their responders, don’t really understand how they work, why those of us in the trade believe in them (otherwise we wouldn’t bother doing them, as nobody makes much money on them and they divert us from doing more profitable business).

And if you’re wondering, of the 65 polls published since the beginning of the year, the accuracy score is a credible 93.5% against a 95% out of 100% target for a perfect score: 98% - damn near perfect. Do the weather people do so well? Punters? Do you?

If you want the numbers, email me. I’d be happy to send the evidence winging back. The full table is on our web site, and we’ll be keeping a running total from here on right up to the next election.

Keep taking the polls…

Bob Worcester

What will McCain’s spinners make of all this?

For weeks I have been arguing that Obama has got to find a way of dealing with the Clinton supporter issue - many of whom feel, rightly or wrongly, that the nomination was stolen from the former first lady.

Now, on the day of the roll call vote, party bosses have put into place an extraordinary plan to stop splits appearing on prime time television. So, according to the Independent, there will be no roll call on the floor of the convention - instead voting will take place at delegates hotels over breakfast.

All this will do is fan the flames of discontent and provide great material for the legions of journalists in the city who loathe being “managed”. They want copy that’s not from the official spin machine and this action will provide it.

All it requires is for a couple of highly emotional TV interviews with disgruntled Clinton backers and that becomes the defining “image” of Denver.

You can see the move being brought up time and time again by the McCain team as they seek to undermine the legitimacy of their opponent. Remember if the Democratic party primaries had been fought according to Republican party rules then Hillary would have been the nominee. It was that close.

Obama’s handling of his erstwhile opponent is coming under increasing criticism. As the Politico site reports: “..he has taken few of the extra steps that Clinton allies say would have gone miles toward fostering goodwill. He did not work hard to help her retire her $24 million campaign debt. He did not make a high-profile statement repudiating any suggestion that Bill Clinton played “the race card” in the nomination contest — an allegation that the former president considers grossly unfair and that continues to infuriate him. Just as significant, Obama has maintained a certain cool diffidence toward the former president.”

Ever since he secured the nomination in June I’ve been underwhelmed by Obama. In the betting, as I have recalled on many occasions, I backed Obama in May 2005 at the then price 50/1. This gives me a nice prospective cash pool to play with and I’m now using that to bet against the senator from Illinois.

I think his chances are declining all the time and whatever I’m determined to come out of this with a profit.

Mike Smithson