The Mayor election
Ken Livingstone may well lose to Boris Johnson next week. If he does, he should not blame Labour's national difficulties.
says the Guardian.
Now we only have polls to go on at the moment, and the polls are very erratic, partly this is because the 2nd preference votes are hard to estimate with any precision (as noted in the Economist this week) but even the 1st preferences are showing big differences.
But if we average them out, then it suggests Livingstone is performing better relative to the Labour Party than he did at the last election. Then he got 35.7% of the first preferences, when the opinion polls put Labour on 34.6%. This time he is polling an average of 40% when the opinion polls put Labour on 30.6%.
Of course the polls might be overstaing his share of the vote, although the above holds true even for the most pessimistic poll. And the London share of the vote for Labour might be higher than the national share of the vote, or more accurately might be higher relative to the rest of the UK share of the vote than it was back in 2001.
But if the polls are even nearly right, then Livinstone appears to be running about 10% above the Labour share, compared to 1% last time.
Labels: London Mayor
posted by Matthew @ 4/26/2008 09:57:00 AM
Comments: 0
