How many will actually use 2nd, 3rd and 4th choices?

In just 29 days time the results of Labour’s leadership contest will be announced after a prolonged battle that has only this week started to attract serious attention from the mainstream media.

This lack of attention has probably helped David Miliband because what polling there has been is likely to have been affected by the name recognition factor - and the former foreign secretary is much more widely known than his younger brother.

We saw that in polling for the 2007 Labour deputy race where the early YouGov surveys had Hilary Benn well ahead - probably because everybody within the Labour movement has heard the name “Benn”. When the ballots were counted Hillary did not even make the top three.

Yes the voters are all committed in some way because they are party members or political levy paying members of the trade unions - but what proportion of the electorates are watching this as closely as those who visit the main political websites each day or track every minute news development? Not as many as we think I would suggest.

But levels of awareness will change as we move into September and there is more coverage. A week on Sunday, admittedly at the non-prime time slot of 10.30am, the Sky New Labour leadership debate will take place and my guess is that it’ll attract a lot of news coverage that weekend.

My reckoning is that the more the contest gets featured the more it will help candidates other than David Miliband simply because it erodes his higher name recognition advantage.

But there is one factor that will help DaveM that has not really been examined - that large segments of the party member and trade union voters will not exercise their alternative votes. This will reduce the number of potential 2/3/4th preferences in play that could help EdM to catch up. For the big theory behind the younger Miliband’s challenge is that he’ll do much better with the alternative votes.

So my reading is that David Miliband is still the odds on favourite but EdM has a better chance than the current prices suggest. As I write the Betfair odds make DM a 71% chance with EdM at 27.4%.

Mike Smithson

OpenDemocracy

Could you write a PB guest slot?

At the start of September I’m going to be out of the country for a few days and I’m setting up some guest slots in advance. Rod Crosby has been commissioned to write a “The case for voting YES” in the AV referendum and I’m looking for someone to present the NO argument.

Dont’ write anything yet but if you’d like to have a bash email me first here.

I’ll need it all sorted by Monday morning.

Mike Smithson

Should they back him for International Development Secretary?

According to Guido Gordon Brown is taking soundings about making a return to the Labour front bench as Shadow International Development Secretary.

When Labour is in opposition the members of the shadow cabinet are not decided by the leader but by the parliamentary which votes on the 19 places. The plan is for this to take place once the new leader is in place. If Gordon is serious about this, and we’ve only got Guido’s report, then he would have to put himself forward for election.

That could be a high risk strategy because he might not do as well in such an election as would be expected for a former leader.

But international development is an area where he took a very special interest when he was both chancellor and PM and he is well regarded around the world. I think that it would be a good idea.

The big question is would Ed or DaveM want him in their line-up?

Mike Smithson

Guardian

Should the red team look at its own recent history?

One of the most provocative political columns this morning is John Harris’s look at Labour’s view of the Lib Dems by in the Guardian.

He concludes:”… Miserable poll ratings may serve to bind the Lib Dems in, for fear of another election and a real calamity. And one other thing: never forget their deep, burning and often understandable hatred of the Blair and Brown governments – which, given the basic messages given out by the Labour leadership campaign, will endure. As far as Lib Dems are concerned, the two Labour frontrunners effectively cancel each other out: the Miliband keenest to question the last government’s record (Ed, that is) lectures them about the alleged betrayal of their own traditions and jokes about making them “extinct”, whereas his brother is said to be more open to what we must now call “pluralism”, but remains more or less unrepentant about the New Labour fundamentals – and in particular the great Lib Dem irritant cum badge-of-honour that was Iraq.

Yes, this year’s Lib Dem conference will have its moments….But here is what far too many people are missing: that even if the most malign accounts are true and the party has been hijacked by a free market clique, the fact that it has delivered power will probably be more than enough to keep a lid on any trouble. Before Labour people get far too carried away, they ought to remember that until very recently, that was their story too.”

I’m not totally convinced by Harris’s conference point. Lib Dem conferences are much less controlled by the central party machine than Labour and there are fewer constraints on dissident elements. Things could erupt in Liverpool.

The big picture, of course, is that in the last decade and a half all three parties have at some point entered into what amount to Faustian pacts for the sake of power.

The Tory party acquiescence at aspects of the Cameron leadership and now the coalition is a case in point. After all what’s the point of being in politics if you are not in power or striving to achieve it?

Maybe until the events of May 11th many on the yellow side took a different view. Now for them the world has changed. It is far better, surely, to be under sustained fire than to be sitting on the opposite benches experiencing the impotence of opposition?

Mike Smithson