Would you bet on this horse-race?
March 18th, 2007 | 
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The French presidential election is a two stage process which creates almost a horse race approach to the presentation of statistics from the various polls.
Whilst Sarkozy is clearly the front runner and, to a UK audience, “obviously” he will win, that’s not quite so obvious as it might appear. If, as seems likely, the first stage vote doesn’t give Sarkozy over 50% of the vote then the top two polling candidates will proceed to the second stage of the voting.
As we write this, it seems certain that Sarkozy will get through to the second stage and let’s take that as read for the moment to simplify the rest of this discussion.
The second person who gets through is far from a sure thing at this point as the polls are indicating that Royal is sitting on 23% and Bayrou on 21%. Considering how polls work, it’s quite possible that the real position is, say, Royal on 21% and Bayrou on 23%. Yes, the polls indicate a margin of error which would exclude that but that’s before you consider the major problem that the pollsters face which is that those they ask sometimes say what “sounds good” rather than saying the way that they will actually vote. Some years ago this resulted in a totally incorrect prediction in the UK in the days when people thought that they should say they were going to vote Labour but they actually voted Conservative on election day.
In any event, the second position candidate could be either Royal or Bayrou which leaves us with two possibilities for the second round ie Sarkozy vs Royal or Sarkozy vs Bayrou.
Interestingly, the polls indicate that Sarkozy will only win if he is up against Royal in the second round and even then only by a small margin (2%). If he’s up against Bayrou, chances are that he’ll lose by a fairly large margin (10%). So, although Sarkozy has a comfortable 6% lead on Royal on the first round, he’s more likely to lose the second round than he is to win it.
I don’t know if they get into tactical voting in France, but if they do, it looks like it would be worthwhile for Sarkozy supporters to be encouraging Royal supporters and for Bayrou supporters to be encouraging Sarkozy supporters at this point.
Would you still bet on the outcome of the race?
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I certainly would not bet on the outcome of the presidential elections. It seems to me it is very difficult to predict who will win because of the two stage poll.
That second stage certainly makes life a LOT more complicated. Even though it seems clear from the statistics that Bayrou is the most likely to win it does seem rather odd.
I’m voting Bayrou and I like your optimism Arnold, but I’m not so sure about the outcome of this election !