The Conservatives have taken a commanding 19-point lead over Labour with less than three weeks to go before voters head to the polls, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer.
Related: Poll models fail to spot voting variation in similar seats
Continue reading...Everything pointed to a Labor win in the 2019 election. But it is only a pretence that we are in the certainty business
The federal election wash-up is a quaint sort of ritual. There are, inevitably, explosions of feelpinion about why one side won and the other side lost. The victors rush to write the first draft of history, and on the losing side there is a frenzy of backside covering and jostling for future advancement, masquerading as deep insights about who failed to do what and when.
All of it, the initial download – masters of the universe versus the vanquished – is inherently unreliable because the protagonists are unreliable. They are still processing what has happened and they are positioning for the next thing, because that’s how the psychology of politics works. Everything is refracted through post-campaign decompression and self-interest.
Continue reading...A major YouGov survey shows that extremists are not as prevalent as you might think
It is not hard to scroll through a huge global opinion survey and find the outliers. They are many and compelling: vaccine-doubters, conspiracy theorists, arch-pessimists and even people who approve of Theresa May.
The danger however is that these newspoints can give us a certain impression about the world: that outliers are the norm, that eccentrics are far more prevalent than they actually are.
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