He who is without Sindo..

OK, started doing this last night but after a glass or 2 of vino I found the constituency count sims a bit ‘tiring’, so put it off to today.  Will be brief…

Sindo poll today from Millward Brown, which sows big gains for FF and LP, Indos down.  We are told that “Uniquely, the poll was limited to registered voters who say they are either “certain” or “likely” to vote”, which is an odd statement as other pollsters do this or similar (RedC recently increased the certainty threshold) and so one presumes this means this is a change to the MB method, which makes movement hard to judge, i.e. is it a result of real world change or the change in method?

Projections as follows;

FG	27%	52
FF	23%	41
SF	19%	31
LB	6%	5
GP	2%	1
AAA/PBP	5%	6
SocDems	4%	6
Renua	2%	2
OTH	12%	14
	100%	158

The couple of points LP are lower compared to RedC sees them miss out on a rake of seats (indeed falling short of the 7 required to be a Dail party), suggesting there is a very big tipping point for them between 6-8%… if they are about 7% on the day (quite possible on current polling) I suspect they will be involved in a lot of dogfights.  If they fall as low as this on polling day, this could be the last time the party contests an election (at least in its current form), as consideration of a re-alignment of the centre-left would surely arise if both they and the SocDems were below that threshold.  But we’ll see.

FF will be well pleased with this poll, along with B&A it suggests that they will be comfortably the 2nd largest party in the next Dail.  The dilemma will be whether to Tallaght-strategy FG, coalesce (unlikely on these figures I think), or work to pull the plug in a few months and try to be the largest party in a 2nd vote (if these figures were delivered upon this week, that would be very possible, with FG in striking distance).

OTH looks too low to me, but beyond that, not much more can say on this one.

MRBI tomorrow, given their past record this will be a big one.

D