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

[pierre-fermat.livejournal.com]

Con 35 Lab 28 Lib 26 Oth 11

Giving the Tories more seats but not a majority.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"Giving the Tories more seats but not a majority"

Nate Silver disagrees, with that kind of split.

"What if the Conservatives do really well instead? (There is some notion that pre-election polls tend to underestimate Conservatives' standing, although I have not investigated this myself). If, for example, conservatives were to get about 37 percent of the vote with Labour and LibDems both between 26-27, our model shows them in control of Parliament with 333 seats, whereas uniform swing gives them only 304."

Again, I give Silver a lot of credit because he has a track record of being accurate.

[pierre-fermat.livejournal.com]

He doesn't seem to have considered that more people are prepared to vote tactically against the Conservatives than against Labour. If the uniform swing machines are wrong it is probably in underestimating the seats that will be won by the Lib Dems and Others. Both Labour and the Tories will lose seats that they wouldn't have on a uniform swing. Labour have more seats to lose but the Conservatives are seen as the real enemy by many Lab and Lib voters who will vote for whichever party is most likely to keep the Tory out.

In 30 hours time I may have been proved very wrong...

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

That appears to only result in the strong LibDem showing I allude to upthread.

This is a moving target. Here's his most recent projection, unlike my original pointer, which discussed a number of possibilities. (I keep including links to my sources in the naive hope readers will use them, despite all evidence otherwise. This leads to behavior like saying, "He doesn't seem to have considered..." when he did, it's just I didn't quote that part, because again, I had the hope one would click through if one was interested, and not rely solely on my {obviously} abridged representation of his position.)