Election Predictions

[drplokta]

Anyone care to have a guess at the percentage breakdown of the national election result (excluding Northern Ireland constituencies)? No more new entries after 10pm on Thursday evening, which will be exactly a week before the polling stations close and we start to get exit polls. The winner will be the person who has the lowest total difference between their guess and the actual result. The smaller parties (SNP, Plaid Cymru, UKIP, BNP, Respect, etc.) are all bundled together under "Other". I recommend that your choices add up to 100%, but it's not compulsory.

My guess is Conservatives 36%, Labour 29%, Lib Dems 25%, Other 10%. That would be a hung Parliament unless something very odd happens at the constituency level, with the Conservatives having a few more seats than Labour.

Comments

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

From Nate Silver, who was far and away the most accurate predictor of the 2008 US Electoral College:

"How about a scenario in which the Liberal Democrats do really, really well? Suppose that they get 20 percent of Labour's voters and 20 percent of Conservatives, as well 10 percent from Great Britain based 'others'. We'll also give an additional 10 percent of Labour's 2005 vote to Conservatives. This would imply that LibDems wind up with 36.4 percent of the vote nationwide..."

That sounds plausible to me in the current circumstances. Per Silver, it yields LibDem 36%, Tory 29%, Labour 25%, and Other 10%.

The "Voter In the Street" interview I've heard that was reallly interesting went like this: "I'm tired of the Labour govt, but I've never voted Tory in my life (and won't). So I'm going to vote LibDem..." I just don't get the impression the Tories have convinced anyone aside from their base that they're human beings, and I think that's going to be a widespread attitude. I also think there are a non-zero number of Tories who are "Not-Labour," rather than Tory as such. The more plausible the LibDems become, the more they'll get a virtuous cycle in swing.

At least, that's the view from this ignorant Amurrican.

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

Silver's poll analysis was covered in today's Guardian. It all sounds extremely plausible and sensible to me; I have argued for some time that polls which translate national percentages into uniform swings are nonsense because they completely ignore the individual factors which influence the results in each constituency -- whether the incumbent has a personal following, voters' experience of fluctuations in hospital waiting times, factory closures or expansions which affect the local jobless figures, even what the council has been doing about waste collection and parking.

The bottom line, I think, is that -- once the numbers have been crunched and the voting results (whatever they actually are) have been analysed to within an inch of their lives -- UK pollsters will be beating as path to Silver's door after 6 May. And rightly so.