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Leo Varadkar is Counting his Chickens
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In case you don’t visit his site regularly, Leo Varadkar is extrapolating yesterday’s Red C poll across the country to make seat projections.
The result would be FG 72 seats, FF 45, LAB 33, SF 8, Greens 4 and Others 4 – Higgins, O’Sullivan, Lowry and Murphy.
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Possible casualties include Michael McGrath, Martin Mansergh, Ned O’Keefe, Margaret Conlon, both of the Andrews or even Hanafin, Michael Mulcahy, Conor Lenihan, Peter Power and Beverly Flynn or Daragh Calleary.
Cluck… 72?? And a spreadsheet no less! And 33 for Labour? Gilmore Gale indeed. He needs to get the wind up some of his current front bench never mind the candidates being selected at the moment.
Leo’s ambition is for an overall Fine Gael majority government. His belief in that possibility is rare, especially among Fine Gaelers, but he wants to create that belief among FG supporters by propaganda or any other means, fair or foul. Any analysis he produces should be taken with a large grain of salt; the model he’s using is flawed and it’s far too early to be making predictions on the numbers as he readily admits himself in his own blog. Harmless fun stuff, for so long as he doesn’t start believing in his own propaganda anyway.
If Gilmore tries to take the studied ambiguity line on the option of coalition with FF, then there’s an outside possibly of FG being within a few independents / Green stragglers / presentable Shinners of an overall majority.
There are many in the wider Labour movement who secretly yearn for some pretext to avoid going in with the Blueshirts again and instead cosy up the soft-left wing of FF. If the electorate senses this and calculates the only way to avoid an FF resurrection is to vote FG instead of Labour, then they’ll hold their noses and vote that way.
Michael Marsh from TCD comes up with some broadly similar figures.
http://politicalreformireland.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/latest-opinion-poll-trends-show-why-government-is-in-for-the-long-haul/
John,
Good piece from Prof. Marsh, but as he points out any predictions based on Red C polls at this stage are crude for the same reasons that Leo gave: that the percentages will not spread evenly throughout every cosntituency in the country and it all depends on when an election happens and what happens in the course of the campaign. The only certainty is that FF will get hammered; the question is how badly?
Dear, oh dear. Varadkar and his spreadsheet – sounds a lot like Garret and his tape-measure, doesn’t he?
Will the young bulldog of today mellow into the Saturday IT columnist of some decades hence?