"For the exit poll seat projections to be right, Labour had to be wiped out in Scotland, the Liberal Democrats would have to be wiped out in their Tory marginals and we would have to done really badly in the English marginals," the campaign aide recalled.
Ashcroft is the only philanthropist inclined to spend millions polling individual seats, which gives him an immense amount of power.
Polling individual seats is a relatively new phenomenon in Australia, and it's still a work in progress.
It polled two hundred and thirty-two seats, far below its most abject fears.
The five-party coalition which is the main opposition block would have to become a single party to translate its big lead in the polls into seats.
Even though they have been campaigning for four weeks already, John Howard, the prime minister, and Kevin Rudd, the opposition leader, are both holding their formal launches here, hoping for a final boost in opinion polls.Snaring seats in Queensland will be vital, especially for Mr Rudd.
With Labour neck and neck with the Tories in the opinion polls, Labour seats are considered hard to win.
Firstly, it was a week that laid bare the potentially seismic shifts taking place electorally in Scotland, with Lord Ashcroft's seat-by-seat polling of 16 Scottish constituencies showing the scale of change that may be at hand.
At that time, Labor was polling about 8 seats in the 120-seat Parliament, with the opposition Likud, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, at 30 and the centrist Kadima, led by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in the mid-20s.
When it came time to vote, however, Labour fell far short of the expectations generated by the polling, dropping 26 seats from its performance in the 2010 election to finish with 232 seats compared with 331 seats for the Conservatives and Cameron, who was able to form a majority government.
The detailed polling of marginal seats indicated that both Tories and Labour may each take eight seats off the Liberal Democrats, while two Conservative seats could fall to Ukip.
