The new Politieke Barometer poll is out; curiously not on the usual homepage, and the newspapers haven’t picked up on it, either. See the polls page for the overview.

Four seats change hands since last time, and the Right coalition that’s currently in power conquers back an absolute majority of 76 seats. D66 is again confirmed to be one seat larger than the CDA. 50Plus, the elderly party I still owe you an update about, disappears, though the pollster is careful to note it just barely didn’t make the threshold, so it might be back in two weeks.

Peil.nl released another poll together with the regular one. They asked about a possible fall of government, and what should happen next.

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Peil.nl has released a new poll. Very boring; only two seats change hands. And Peil.nl continues to give the left far too many seats.

Still, take a look at the polls page. It has changed considerably, especially the coalition table. I now generate coalitions automatically since the curated list of the previous version got too big and unwieldy. I hope I found the right rules to keep the number of coalitions in check, and I’ll probably tweak them a little in future weeks.

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A few weeks back I promised to start keeping track of the polls again. When I entered the poll after that, my polling script broke for reasons still unknown, and it took me until today to fix it.

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I am once more keeping track of the polls. Right now Peil.nl publishes a poll every Sunday, and the Politieke Barometer every second Thursday.

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Exit poll is in:

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The Politieke Barometer has released its final poll which I’ve added to the polls page. With that polling is complete, and the polls page contains a final score.

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Peil.nl has released its final poll which I’ve added to the polls page.

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TNS-NIPO has released its final poll which I’ve added to the polls page.

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Peil.nl has released new polls which I’ve added to the polls page.

This poll does not see the shift to the left that the Politieke Barometer reported. I have no direct explanation, except for the general difference in methodology between the two polls. We’ll see who’s right.

(Incidentally, you might notice that my Internet connection from Venice works fine. I expect to report the election results on Wednesday night, plus a little forecast.)

The latest Politieke Barometer poll is out, and it reports nothing less than a six-seat shift to the left. This changes the polls page considerably.

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Oh my, it seems Peil.nl is publishing a daily poll now. After yesterday’s poll, today brings a new one. I added it to the polls page but removed yesterday’s. Right now my system assumes all pollsters publish with roughly the same interval, and for now I want to retain that feature. (I’m afraid I won’t have the time to rewrite the polling page before the elections.)

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Peil.nl and TNS-NIPO have both released new polls, which I’ve added to the polls page.

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I found the last polling results from the 2002, 2003, and 2006 elections, and couldn’t resist studying them a bit better and comparing them to the eventual election outcome. Two trends emerged: one that I more-or-less expected and one that was a complete surprise.

The expected trend was that the polls did an excellent job of capturing the primary theme of an election cycle, but that a secondary, less important but still quite unexpected, theme surfaced in the actual elections.

The surprising trend was that relative to the last polls, the right block as a whole won three seats; two from the left and one from the christians. This happened both in 2003 and 2006, while in 2002 this last-minute shift was exactly twice as large.

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A pollster I haven’t previously heard of, Novum Nieuws, has released a coalition poll. Which coalition do voters prefer?

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The Politieke Barometer has released its second poll this week, and I added it to the polls page. It’s the first poll after Wednesday’s debate.

With a lot of fantasy the new poll can be seen as evidence for my undecideds theory, but the effect is very slight and might easily fall within the margin of error. GL and SP both win one seat, while the PvdA loses one. On the right, the VVD wins one seat while CDA and PVV both lose one. That means one seat has gone from right to left. This is in line with what I predicted, but I was hoping for a clearer support of my theory, and you should feel free to believe the poll results are a coincidence.

I mentioned this in my last poll report, but it deserves a separate entry. How do Dutch pollsters treat the undecideds? What does that mean?

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This morning PvdA party leader Cohen apologised for the errors and vagueness surrounding the PvdA election programme and the amount of recent changes in it.

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The new Politieke Barometer poll has landed, two days earlier than normal due to the debate, and I added it to the polls page.

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Last Friday the new Politieke Barometer poll landed and I added it to the polls page. I didn’t come around to discussing it yet.

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The new Peil.nl poll has landed and I added it to the polls page.

One seat from CDA to CU, one to the VVD from CDA, PvdA, and D66.

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Well, it seems the TNS NIPO poll has finally become a weekly feature. I’ve added it to the polls page.

This poll has always been a bit of an outlyer; while the other two show the CDA at 26 seats, TNS-NIPO gives it only 21 seats, and divides the difference among PVV, D66, and CU. Odd. This poll has the worst track record of the three, so believe what you want.

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Both Peil.nl and the Politieke Barometer have published new polls, and I’ve added them to the polls page. I have also greatly increased the number of coalitions on the polls page.

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Both Peil.nl and the Politieke Barometer have published new polls, and I’ve added them to the polls page.

The VVD has become the second-largest party in the Politieke Barometer, too, celebrating that fact by taking another seat from the CDA. It’s clear now that the campaign will at least start as a PvdA vs. VVD fight. Nobody yet knows whether the CDA will knuckle under or stage yet another improbable comeback, but Balkenende’s party starts on the defensive.

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Both Peil.nl and the Politieke Barometer have published new polls, and I’ve added them to the polls page.

For the first time, the VVD is the second-largest party in both polls, being 3 or 1 seat larger than the CDA, respectively.

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Peil.nl had published a new poll in which respondents were asked for their wishes and expectations regarding coalitions and prime ministers. There are a few nuggets in here.

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Both Peil.nl and the Politieke Barometer have published new polls, and I’ve added them to the polls page.

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I owe my readers an apology for not posting much last week. I was too busy doing other stuff, and besides Dutch politics are now in a relatively calm phase where relatively little is happening.

Anyway, both Peil.nl and the Politieke Barometer have published new polls, and I’ve added them to the polls page.

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The new Peil.nl poll has landed. Also, it seems TNS NIPO has finally started up election polling. In addition to yesterday’s release it turns out they conducted a poll about a month ago, but that one hasn’t been officially published. I added both to the polls page. I expect the new Politieke Barometer poll tonight.

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The new Peil.nl poll has landed, and I’ve added it to the polls page.

Here, too, there’s little change. PvdA wins two seats, one each from GL and D66, VVD also wins two seats, one each from CDA and PVV. Just like in Thursday’s Politieke Barometer the PVV starts to go down ever so slightly, the SP halts is downward trend, and the CDA vacillates but generally goes down. No change in left vs. right, but the broad centre (PvdA, D66, CDA, VVD) wins one seat from each of the flanks.

On my scoreboard the battle for second place after PvdA has started, and it’s exclusively between the three parties of the right. If the VVD captures two more seats from the CDA, it is the second-largest party of the country.

The Purple coalition rises some more (it contains both winners PvdA and VVD, after all), and is now at the same level as the coalition on the right.

An extra question was asked about the tax deductability of interest payments on mortgages.

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The new Politieke Barometer poll has landed, and I’ve added it to the polls page.

Not much to see; one seat from PVV to VVD, one from CDA to CU, one from GL to SP. The CDA is clearly not yet done with its slide, although the momentum has lessened. Conversely, we might see a PVV slide momentum building up. The SP seems to have hit the low point; this is the first time it has won a seat in any poll this year. The centre-left coalition lost one seat and goes back to 75.

I expect the polls to change only gradually in the next few weeks, unless something dramatic happens. The PvdA’s reward for blowing up government has now been accounted for; it’s the other parties’ move.

I do expect a few trends to surface. Has Wilders’s inevitable slide down to about 12-15 seats started yet? Will the CDA go down even more or stabilise? Will the left block win more seats from the right, or has equilibrium been reached?

An extra poll tells us something about how Dutch voters select a party. This topic has been discussed in the comments recently, and it’s nice to be able to show some figures.

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I just discovered that Peil.nl released another poll yesterday, about government formation.

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Oh my, the new Peil.nl poll has landed two days early. I’ve added it to the polls page.

The timing is surprising, the content isn’t. Basically it confirms Thursday’s poll in that the PvdA wins five seats, of which one comes from the right, two from D66, and one each from GL and SP. The centre-left PvdA+CDA+D66 coalition does not yet have a majority in this poll, but does win two seats.

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The new Politieke Barometer poll has landed, and I’ve added it to the polls page.

The PvdA won seven seats, and that’s really a lot for just one week. Even in my dampened-down average the PvdA is now four seats larger than the CDA. It’s clear that the appointment of Cohen has been an excellent move.

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The new Peil.nl poll has landed, and I’ve added it to the polls page.

The most important change is that the PvdA continues to win (+3 this week), and that the incrowd parties PvdA, CDA, VVD, and D66 combined also win (+4 together). The latter is odd for Peil.nl, which generally tends to give extreme and small parties more seats than its competitors do.

In general Peil.nl is moving to the numbers the Politieke Barometer gives. Still, it’s too early to tell whether this means a true change in the electorate or a random fluctuation.

I’ve been neglecting the recent polls a bit. Each week, Peil.nl (Maurice de Hond) and the Politieke Barometer publish their ongoing general election polls (on Sunday and Thursday, respectively), and this are obviously prime data sources for any Dutch political blog.

Reason I’ve been neglecting them is that I was working on a polls and coalition overview, which is now finally finished. In the future I can give a brief overview of every new poll and refer you to this page for the details, as well as the poll trends.

The page also contains a coalition creation game, where you can try your hand at forming a stable majority coalition, and find out why it takes so bloody long.

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Some small fry that might be of interest to political observers:

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It’s time to take a look at some official elections polls. In the table below I’ve repeated the most recent polls of Peil.nl and the Politieke Barometer (try translating that one for yourself). The third Dutch pollster, TNS NIPO, doesn’t seem to have started publishing parliament election polls yet.

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Oh my, Peil.nl has published more polls, and they consistently show that Bos’s gamble is still paying off.

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Yesterday the first poll (PDF) since the fall of government was released, and broadly speaking it shows that Bos’s gamble is paying off — for now. The Dutch voters agree with him on both the policy and the politics side, and the PvdA is gaining seats once more.

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