Is Liz Truss a certainty to be the next PM?

We're down to the final two and Liz Truss starts the run-off campaign as clear favourite to succeed Boris Johnson as Tory leader.

Before the final round of MP's voting, Truss was hovering at around a 50% probability of winning the race. Once we knew Mordaunt had been eliminated, the odds settled at around 60-40 in her favour over Rishi Sunak. Then we saw the first poll of Tory members after the final two had been confirmed: A 62%-38% lead for Truss (excluding don't knows) from YouGov. That moved the market sharply, with Truss's chances moving up to 68%.

It seems like it might be quite hard to find a large, representative sample of party members to get accurate polling in these contests, but the pollsters have actually done pretty well in the most recent Conservative and Labour leadership elections. There is no reason to think that their numbers won't be a reasonably good reflection of opinion right now in the party. Sunak seemingly has a mountain to climb but the odds give him a much better chance than was the case with Jeremy Hunt v Boris Johnson in 2019, even though the advantage Johnson had in the early polls was quite similar to that enjoyed by Truss right now.

Interestingly, when you look at the Smarkets' prices on the vote shares that each candidate will receive, they anticipate a much closer overall result. The midpoint forecast from those would indicate a final result more like 55%-45% in favour of Truss. It's early days and these markets aren't very liquid right now, but it seems to suggest that people are expecting Sunak to make up some ground in the campaign. Maybe an event like Monday's BBC head-to-head debate can move the dial for Sunak - he certainly seemed to get a big boost out of the Channel 4 debate during the MP's voting stage. Truss's performance that night was seen as being fairly disastrous and her odds nosedived as a result.