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

[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.