A good - if obvious - tip for the US presidential election

As I've mentioned before, I have a winning track record on political betting, albeit based on a very small number of bets over the years...

* A few months before the 2010 general election, I was bullied (all right, badgered) into a supposed mug's bet by a certain "international thriller writer" on Stormfront Lite.  He was convinced the Conservatives would win an overall majority, I begged to differ.  I won.  (He then sent me his latest novel in lieu of my winnings.)

* A couple of years before the 2014 indyref, I was bullied (all right, badgered) by another Stormfront Lite poster into another three "unwinnable" bets - a) that Yes would win, b) that Yes would not lose by more than a 15% margin, and c) that 16 and 17 year olds (or "children" as someone sneered) would have the right to vote.  I won two of the three, and made a net profit.

* At some point prior to the 2015 general election, I made a final private bet with a Stormfront Lite poster (Antifrank, no less), although there wasn't any bullying involved this time.  He thought Labour would gain more seats from the Scottish Lib Dems than the SNP would, and I took the opposite view.  I won.

* On the day of the 2016 EU referendum, although I still thought Remain were the most likely winners, I placed a bet on Leave because it seemed to me the odds were ludicrously out of kilter with opinion polls that were still very tight.  In retrospect people's reasons for being so certain of a Remain victory were extremely circular - one group of people was convinced because another group of people was convinced.  There were always dark murmerings about private polls, but the reality is those would have been showing much the same as the public polls.

* Six months later at the US presidential election, I toyed with a bet on Donald Trump on a similar basis to my Leave bet.  In the end I held off until well after the polls closed, but remarkably, even after it started to become clear that things were going Trump's way, Hillary Clinton remained the clear favourite and it was possible to get extremely good value odds on Trump.  I've noticed that when surprise election results occur, there often seems to be a 'lag' effect on the betting markets.  It's as if punters can't quite accept what they're seeing with their own eyes.  The same thing happened in the EU referendum, and also when Bernie Sanders won Michigan.  

* On the day of the run-off for the 2017 French presidential election, I spotted an opportunity for a value bet on Macron securing between 65% and 70% of the vote.  The provisional exit poll figures suggested he could go very close to 65%, yet the odds on that outcome remained very steep.  As soon as the official exit poll predicted he'd be slightly above 65%, I cashed out and took a partial profit straight away to be on the safe side (although obviously with hindsight I wish I hadn't).

* In this year's Polish presidential election, I placed a bet against Andrzej Duda, who was mysteriously the strong odds-on favourite in spite of being more or less level in the polls.  I lost, but I'm still convinced it made perfect sense as a value bet.

So, armed with that track record, let me point out something that should be blindingly obvious - there is overwhelming evidence that Joe Biden is heading for a convincing victory next month, and yet the odds on the betting exchanges imply that Trump still has a roughly 1 in 3 chance of winning.  It just doesn't add up.  I'm not saying that a bet on Biden is 'free money', there's still an element of risk, but for Trump to win something pretty improbable would have to happen - either there would have to be a systemic polling error of a magnitude much greater than was seen in 2016, or a random event would have to occur to totally change the trajectory of the campaign, and it would have to be a dramatic enough event to overcome the substantial lead Biden presumably already has as a result of early votes that cannot now be changed.

The bottom line - if you don't mind your money being tied up for a couple of weeks, a bet on Biden (or perhaps a lay bet against Trump for extra security) is just about the most clear-cut value bet you'll ever see.

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An SNP Plan B is essential for neutralising the Tories' leaked tactics for thwarting an indyref

 

Leaked Tory memo confirms their plan to ignore the result of the next Scottish election, after ignoring Scotland’s Remain vote, & rejection of the Tories since 1955. An anti-democracy strategy that will only strengthen support for independence. 👍

— Michael Gray (@GrayInGlasgow) October 19, 2020

I normally agree with Michael Gray about most things, but I can see a rather huge logical problem with his reaction to the Tory war gaming on how to thwart an independence referendum.  The leaked tactics are not really about changing minds on independence - they're about subverting the democratic process even while support for independence is high. So if the SNP and the wider Yes movement define 'success' as strong opinion poll support for independence, in the absence of concrete progress towards an indyref or towards independence itself, we'd be playing straight into Westminster's hands.

One suggestion is that Westminster will not give a definitive 'No' to a Section 30 order in the aftermath of an SNP majority victory next year, but will instead imply that it's merely a 'No' in the short-term - essentially a rehash of Theresa May's "now is not the time" wheeze.  If the SNP leadership remain boxed in by their insistence that the Section 30 process is the only valid route to a referendum, it's not hard to see how they could be successfully strung along for years without a great deal of effort.  A vague (false) sense that a concession might be around the corner would be enough.

There's also an indication that Westminster could put together its own unilateral package on 'further devolution' (a complete joke given that the existing devolution settlement is in the middle of being gutted by the Internal Market Bill), hold a Yes/No referendum on it, and thus bypass the independence question altogether.  That could potentially be quite an effective tactic unless the SNP stand ready to force a consultative indyref at around the same time.  How else would they react to Westminster's referendum?  Urge a boycott?  Ask people to vote for new powers that are better than nothing, but spend the campaign complaining that they don't go far enough?  Neither of those options would be particularly fruitful, and afterwards Westminster would just say that the new settlement within the UK is Scotland's "settled will".

Incidentally, even the merest possibility of another Vow-style promise of more devolution should be a warning to us of the importance of making abundantly clear to people that devolved powers are being taken away right now.  The BBC are failing in their duty to keep the public informed, and the recent Progress Scotland poll confirmed that there is still considerable ignorance out there.  So it really is up to us - we can't let Westminster get away with a false narrative that the history of devolution has been a one-way process of powers being steadily granted to Holyrood.

The only part of the war gaming that looks pretty naive and hopeless is the idea that the EU can somehow be "co-opted" into saying that there is no road back to membership for an independent Scotland.  Quite how Britain is supposed to have gained sufficient goodwill with the EU during Brexit negotiations is something of a mystery.

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Steve Baker calling for the disestablishment of the Church of England in response to four bishops criticising the Internal Market Bill in a letter to the Financial Times is quite possibly the funniest thing I've read all year.

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Click HERE for the Scot Goes Pop poll fundraiser - just £500 away from reaching its target!

Your suggestions for poll questions, please

First of all, thank you to everyone who has donated to the crowdfunder so far.  I was particularly grateful to Paul Kavanagh for spontaneously helping to promote it, literally just a couple of days before he was taken ill.  It was great to see him in such good form in his telephone interview with The National the other day, and I know that all our thoughts and good wishes continue to be with him as he recovers.

After just over a week, £5208 has been raised of the £6000 target.  As always happens, the rate of donations has slowed as time has gone on, so there's no guarantee we'll make the target, but with a bit of luck it should now be possible to commission another opinion poll of some description.  I'm still mulling over the timing - it'll be at some point between now and mid-December.  But now is certainly not too early to be thinking about possible questions, so if you have any brilliant suggestions, please leave them in the comments section below.

On a completely unrelated subject, someone raised concerns the other day about the supposedly unappealing range of candidates for President of Scotland we'd be faced with if we became independent and then abolished the monarchy.  So I'd also like to ask for your nominations for President, and then maybe I'll run a strictly unscientific internet poll about that.  I'm looking for serious nominations, mainly - I'll be interested to see if we can demonstrate that we can produce Presidents that are just as good as Ireland has managed of late.  (And remember that even if we retain the monarchy, we'd probably still need a Governor-General, which amounts to the same thing apart from the lack of democratic accountability.)

Even Jim Bergerac isn't safe from the Westminster power grab...

 

This is utterly extraordinary. If anyone has any doubts that Westminster is engaged in a power grab, watch this video from Jersey's Minister of External Relations (who was a Tory when he lived in the UK).https://t.co/bDq9E4rOpw

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 18, 2020

The Scottish Tories suddenly have a Lib Dem problem

I asked earlier how on earth the SNP had managed to hold on to win the Ellon & District by-election when there were more than enough Lib Dem voters to see the Tories home on transfers.  Well, the answer is very simple - here's how the Lib Dem votes transferred for the final count.

Conservatives 161

SNP 159

Non-transferable 165

Nobody could ever accuse the Lib Dem leadership of being equidistant between the Tories and the SNP, but it looks like their voters suddenly are.  And if you think about it, that's perfectly logical, because Lib Dem voters are typically opposed to both independence and Brexit, so there's no longer any particular reason why the Tories would automatically be the more attractive option.

The Tories would appear to have now lost a major advantage in constituency tussles with the SNP, because tactical votes from Lib Dem supporters will probably be going in both directions.  And arguably there's a warning here for the Lib Dems themselves - will their voters stay loyal if they train too much of their fire on the SNP and independence, and not enough on the Tories and Brexit?

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NEW CROWDFUNDER: On Saturday I launched a fundraiser for the next Scot Goes Pop poll on independence, which I intend to commission at some point between now and Christmas.  If you'd like to donate, please click HERE.

SNP's victory in Ellon & District by-election is proof that the surge has reached Tory-friendly areas

I'm not entirely sure whether it was sensible for a local council by-election to have taken place yesterday, but it did, and it was in the sort of place where by-elections in recent years have routinely seen the Tories hold off any SNP challenge.  The very different result this time demonstrates how much the political weather has changed.

Ellon & District by-election first preference result:

SNP 42.4% (+10.5) 

Conservatives 41.7% (+0.8) 

Liberal Democrats 10.2% (-9.5) 

Labour 2.9% (-4.7) 

Greens 2.8% (+2.8)

Technically this was an SNP 'hold', but the Tories had a very healthy lead in the popular vote in the ward last time around, so they could have 'gained' the seat even with a substantial swing against them.  Indeed, they would have been expected to gain the seat even with the SNP having a slight lead on first preferences.  It's slightly mysterious it didn't work out that way, because the Lib Dem vote was substantial enough to mean that unionist transfers should have got the Tories over the line handily.  Is the unionist bloc vote breaking down?

'Settled will'

I've been asked by two or three people whether the 58% Yes vote in yesterday's Ipsos-Mori poll has changed my view on whether 60% is unattainable.  It actually hasn't, although let me be clear about what I mean by that.  It's certainly not unthinkable that there could be the odd individual poll with a figure of 60% or higher, but I still think it's very unlikely that we'll consistently see that level of support over a sustained period.  As things stand, there still hasn't been a single online poll showing a Yes vote higher than 55% - and that's significant, because the vast majority of polls are conducted online.

In a sense the whole 60% thing may now be academic, though.  It was only ever a point of discussion because of the suspicion that the SNP were using an unattainable 'target figure' as an excuse for putting off an independence referendum indefinitely.  That no longer seems to be a danger, because Keith Brown stated yesterday that independence is now the "settled will" of the Scottish people.  Those were clearly very carefully chosen words, and strongly imply that the 52-58% we've seen in recent polls is 'enough' as far as the SNP leadership is concerned.  (Although I'm not sure if Andrew Wilson was trying to push back against that when he described the people's will as "settling" rather than "settled".)

When John Smith famously described devolution as Scotland's settled will, he meant that support for a Scottish Parliament was astronomically high, that it hadn't changed for many years, and that there was therefore no need to hold another referendum to test public opinion.  Ironically, none of those points apply to the current situation - it's a mere seven months since a poll last had No in the lead, so it can scarcely be said that public opinion is no longer subject to fluctuation or change.  And I think we can safely assume that Nicola Sturgeon won't be using the Yes lead in the polls as a justification for declaring independence without a referendum.  But however dubious the usage of the words "settled will" may be, it's still incredibly heartening to hear them being used.

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NEW CROWDFUNDER: On Saturday I launched a fundraiser for the next Scot Goes Pop poll on independence, which I intend to commission at some point between now and Christmas.  If you'd like to donate, please click HERE.

Is it nine in a row for Yes? Ten in a row?

Bloody hell, the BBC website is actually covering the Ipsos-Mori poll. So the answer to the question, how many Yes-majority polls does it take to get the BBC to report the story, is "about ten in a row".

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) October 14, 2020

It might be worth starting with a discussion of how many ''in a row" it actually is, because that's no longer such a straightforward question.  The first port of call for many people will be Wikipedia's list of polls (if only because it's top of the search engine rankings), which suggests we've now had ten Yes majorities in a row - but that's including the Survation/Progress Scotland poll, which asked a "non-standard question".  The snag is that it's only a few weeks since Wikipedia's inclusive policy towards non-standard questions stretched as far as Scotland in Union's notorious propaganda polls using the "Remain in the UK/Leave the UK" format.  If those polls were still being included, we'd currently only be on three Yes-majority polls in a row, because believe it or not there was a poll as recently as mid-September that purported to show a majority for "remaining in the UK".  For my money, the most logical approach is to only include polls that ask the standard, binary-choice independence question, and on that basis it's nine Yes majorities in a row.

The BBC website's unexpected acknowledgement of the Ipsos-Mori poll came in the form of an analysis piece by John Curtice, who surprised me somewhat in the angle he took.  He suggested that we'd need further polls before knowing whether "the higher level of support for Yes" is just "random variation".  I actually think it's highly unlikely that there has been a further recent increase in the Yes vote, but I don't think the 58% in the Ipsos-Mori poll is random variation either - it's almost certainly caused by methodology.  If you look back over recent years, telephone polls by Ipsos-Mori have again and again stood out for producing better results for Yes than online polls conducted at around the same time.  For example, the most recent Ipsos-Mori poll before yesterday was in the middle of last year's general election campaign, and showed an exact 50-50 split.  Online polls during the campaign consistently had No ahead.  

Incidentally, it may not be just the telephone data collection method that sets Ipsos-Mori apart - I believe I'm right in saying that they also only weight by demographics, and not by past vote recall.  That probably makes it easier for Yes to poll well.  The datasets show that the weighted sample for the new poll was made up of 398 people who recalled voting Yes in 2014, and only 375 people who recalled voting No.  It might seem obvious that this undermines the credibility of the poll's results, but I'm not sure it's as simple as that - we're now more than six years on from the indyref, and pollsters who do weight by recalled vote are taking a big gamble that their respondents will accurately remember votes that were cast a very long time ago.  

Scottish Parliament constituency voting intentions:

SNP 58% 
Conservatives 19% 
Labour 13% 
Liberal Democrats 8% 

Scottish Parliament regional list voting intentions:

SNP 47% 
Conservatives 19% 
Labour 13% 
Greens 9% 
Liberal Democrats 8%

Seats projection: SNP 73 (+10), Conservatives 22 (-9), Labour 15 (-9), Greens 10 (+4), Liberal Democrats 9 (+4)

Pro-independence parties 83 seats (+14), anti-independence parties 46 seats (-14)

Those are truly abysmal figures for both the Tories and Labour - the former are down in the teens, and the latter are barely even in the teens.  It's hard to say which of the two parties should feel more chastened.

I have more analysis of the poll in The National - you can read it HERE.  

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NEW CROWDFUNDER: On Saturday I launched a fundraiser for the next Scot Goes Pop poll on independence, which I intend to commission at some point between now and Christmas.  If you'd like to donate, please click HERE.

58% Yes: Writing is on the wall for the United Kingdom as support for indy hits record high in telephone poll

Since the independence referendum in 2014, there's been a general trend that telephone polling has produced better results for Yes than online polling - an exact reversal of what was the case before the referendum.  Unfortunately the recent period of Yes majorities has coincided with a total absence of telephone polls, so although I did wonder aloud a few times whether the differential was continuing and a telephone poll might produce something over and above a Yes vote in the low-to-mid 50s, there was no way of knowing for sure.  Luckily STV have now resumed their long-running series of telephone polls with Ipsos-Mori, and the result is not a disappointment.

Should Scotland be an independent country? (Ipsos-Mori, 2nd-9th October 2020)

Yes 58% (+8)

No 42% (-8)

This is almost certainly the biggest lead for independence in any poll from any firm, ever.  It's difficult to find records from the early days of devolution (when TNS polls sometimes showed a Yes lead), but 58% is undoubtedly the highest Yes vote in a published poll since independence became a serious proposition in 2011.  The previous high watermark was 55%.

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NEW CROWDFUNDER: On Saturday I launched a fundraiser for the next Scot Goes Pop poll on independence, which I intend to commission at some point between now and Christmas.  If you'd like to donate, please click HERE.

Progress Scotland poll: By 3-1 margin, voters want the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government to have control over all decisions affecting the people of Scotland's lives

Well, the first thing to say about the latest batch of results from the Progress Scotland/Survation poll is that they include a question about an independent Scotland's currency that is very similar to the one I've been strongly urged to ask in my own forthcoming poll, so I may have been saved the trouble.  Perhaps disappointingly, an absolute majority of respondents (54%) want to keep the pound in the long-term.  Only 19% favour the most likely compromise of retaining the pound in the short-term and moving to a Scottish currency later on, and a mere 5% would want a Scottish currency straight away.  Just 10% want to join the euro.

Another mildly disappointing result is that a slim plurality (40% to 38%) want the UK Government to retain control over foreign affairs and defence.  On the face of it, that contradicts the desire of a clear majority in the poll for Scotland to become an independent country, although respondents may have just been answering in respect of what they think should happen if Scotland remains a devolved part of the UK.

The good results are, however, very good.  By the decent margin of 45% to 34%, respondents say that independence would be beneficial for the Scottish economy in the long run - radically different from polling findings in the run-up to the 2014 indyref.  An enormous majority of 62% to 18% say that all decisions affecting people in Scotland should be made by the Scottish Parliament and Government - that one should terrify unionists.  By 61% to 22%, respondents feel that Scotland's relationship with the EU should be decided by the Scottish Parliament and Government.  And the notion that independence would be more economically damaging than Brexit is rejected by the narrow plurality of 39% to 37%.

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NEW CROWDFUNDER: On Saturday I launched a fundraiser for the next Scot Goes Pop poll on independence, which I intend to commission at some point between now and Christmas.  If you'd like to donate, please click HERE.