Posted on 04/24/2015 4:58:34 AM PDT by UKrepublican
There ya go. People can say what they want about TV ads and microtargeting for voters and whatever else, but at the end of the day, the candidate who makes the effort to actually *connect* with voters is the one they will prefer.
Projections show currently UKIP will keep at least 1, but some say 2 of their current 2 seats.....the likelihood is that is will be much more and the pollsters are going to look very silly as they have in the past.
Sample is the key - if you base a sample on support of the 2010 election, where the Lib Dems were polling far higher and the UKIP vote was just 3% - since then, they have won the European election with 27% of the national vote and won two of three of the last by elections - the outcome of this will obviously point to a far smaller UKIP vote.
The reality is - it will be much higher.
Actually a 9% win coming from next to nothing is remarkable - speaking of third parties - there is actually a reasonable chance the leader of the Liberal Democrats (coalition partners with the Tories) will lose his seat in Sheffield.
Seems like the media is doing its best to suppress UKIP turnout
They have, it has been an onslaught but I think it is failing in its objectives, at least in the long term. UKIP continues to rise, the rest continue to snide at them, and not listen to large parts of the country. It’s a strange time in UK politics, I think it is quite likely we will have to vote again in the next couple of years.
Jolly good! I can’t wait to hear him at Question Time.
NICE.
UKIP has helped push a political consensus on reducing immigration--something that this country has yet to do. The free movement of labor within the EU complicates matters, but there have been reductions of non-EU immigration. It was hilarious to hear Miliband attacking Cameron for not meeting the immigration reduction targets. Who would have ever imagined a Labour leader issuing such a charge? Miliband admitted that Labour made a mistake on the immigration issue. British jobs for British workers resonates with the voters. Scott Walker is following suit linking immigration with job losses and depressed wages. It is a winner politically and scares the Hell out of the political class.
I watched the debates between Farage and Nick Clegg, which Farage won hands down. Clegg made a major mistake participating in them. The Liberal Democrats will be the biggest losers this election cycle.
I know, Pelosi sits in one of the safest Democrat seats in the country while there is no such thing as a safe UKIP seat, but my point is that a year ago Farage’s goal was to get himself elected PM, not to eke out a victory in his own district and lead a caucus of a measly six members. Dick Gephardt’s CD wasn’t safe for Democrats in 1998 or 2000, yet no one would have run a headline saying “Gephardt on Target to Win” if there was a poll showing Gephardt up by 9% but with Republicans poised to keep their House majorities.
Thanks!
Mmm...I hope so, but the problem with surveys like this, particularly ones you commission yourself, is that there is always a built-in bias to the answers that you want to hear.
This is why you hear politicians who are challenged on certain issues sometimes replying with “well the feedback I’m getting on the doorstep doesn’t say that at all”. They’re telling the truth, but it is a fundamental fact of Human psychology that there is a big difference between what people SAY they believe, and what they ACTUALLY will do.
Don’t get me wrong - I think Farage will win Thanet South, but I think its going to be quite close. The problem in getting that elusive breakthrough is that all too much of the voting decisions in the UK (and probably everywhere else as well) is essentially tribal in nature, and that’s very difficult to break down.
I was talking with Alan Piper (UKIP parliamentary candidate for Westmorland and Lonsdale) and he summed it up very well. Getting votes for UKIP (and probably any newer political party actually) is a bit like trying to persuade people to give up smoking. They want change, and they know its good for them, and they know its the right thing to do, but when the chips are down so many folk just can’t bring themselves to break the habit of a lifetime.
The odds are we are going to have a "hung" parliament on May 8th (one where no party, or combination of party's, has an overal majority). That means a weak minority government reliant on constant wheeler-dealing behind the scenes to get any meaningful legislation passed, OR - another election.
It was never a target for Farage to become PM this year, that was never going to happen. Nobody even talked of it.
On FR they did. And it was used as a model for a new third party in the U.S. to usurp the GOP.
I think that must have been an extreme minority even on FR.
Considering they will go from 3 to as high as 20% this time around in just 5 years - that is impressive growth of a political party, model or no model.
I saw a forecasting model from 538 this weekend, and it predicted UKIP holding only one seat in the House of Commons after this election. I hope it’s wrrong.
I’m pretty confident it will be wrong. It will be 5-10 in my opinion. Probably closer to 5, but UKIP will finish second in as many as 100 seats - a massive stepping stone for the next election.
Well, I hope you’re correct about UKIP’s number of first-place finishes, but in a first-past-the-post system “second place” is first loser. And I hope that UKIP’s second-place finishes don’t come mostly in districts where last time the Tories beat Labour but Labour finishes first this time.
Well second place is a loser of course, but it changes the dynamics for the next election.
Interestingly, a great deal of them seats are working class voters in the North in safe Labour seats.
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