UK General Election to be Decided by 20% of Voters in Marginal Constituencies

ElectionOracle / UK General Election Apr 10, 2010 - 01:49 AM GMT

The mainstream press obsess over opinion polls to predominantly determine the average swing from Labour to Conservative (currently 5%). However these general opinion polls are pretty much useless as 80% of voters will have no say in the outcome of the election which will be decided in just 120 marginal seats out of the total of 650.

Therefore to obtain an accurate current state of the parties would be to purely focus on polling voters from within the key marginal seats to determine which way they will actually swing and from what polls have been conducted in marginal's tend to show a wide range of swings from +3% To Labour to +15% to the Conservative Party.

The politicians obviously recognise this which is why resources have been plowed into the 120 marginal's with little effort being put into communicating with the voters of the other 530 seats.

An example of the focus on marginal constituencies is Brentford and Isleworth which is currently held by Labour with a majority of 4,411 votes, where a recent YouGov poll shows a swing from Labour to Conservative of 6.5% against a minimum swing requirement of 4.2% for the Conservatives to win the seat.

So as is usually the case, most voters will be ignored by the politicians as they woo the electorate of marginal constituencies with promises of new hospitals, health centres, schools, nurseries and more over the coming 4 weeks, which goes a long way to explain why government spending and services results in aberrations such as the NHS post code lottery which usually penalise Labour constituencies with strong majorities that repeated return jobs for life MP's.

By Nadeem Walayat

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk

Nadeem Walayat has over 20 years experience of trading derivatives, portfolio management and analysing the financial markets, including one of few who both anticipated and Beat the 1987 Crash. Nadeem's forward looking analysis specialises on UK inflation, economy, interest rates and the housing market and he is the author of the NEW Inflation Mega-Trend ebook that can be downloaded for Free. Nadeem is the Editor of The Market Oracle, a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication. We present in-depth analysis from over 500 experienced analysts on a range of views of the probable direction of the financial markets. Thus enabling our readers to arrive at an informed opinion on future market direction. http://www.marketoracle.co.uk

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