1/10 of the BBC most read stories are about the election.
It's easy to forget that PB is a filter bubble
I don’t think we should confuse two different issues here?
Most people are bored of the election campaign. I know I am and have l little appetite for following it or even the leaders’ debates.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t interest in the vote and result. People are seething with the Conservatives and have been for two or three years. We feel that they are thoroughly nasty, have screwed public services, and messed up people’s mortgages and cost of living etc. etc.
It’s just that minds were made up ages back, whatever the MSM tries to claim otherwise.
Anyone have a list of the 66 seats the Tories would hold? I wonder if Micky Fab's is one of them.
Aldridge-Brownhills Wendy Morton Arundel and South Downs Andrew Griffith Beaconsfield Joy Morrissey Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk John Lamont Bicester and Woodstock Unknown (new seat) Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe Fay Jones Brentwood and Ongar Alex Burghart Brigg and Immingham Martin Vickers Buckinghamshire Mid Greg Smith Cambridgeshire North East Steve Barclay Chichester Gillian Keegan Christchurch Christopher Chope Cotswolds North Unknown (new seat) Daventry Chris Heaton-Harris Devon South Anthony Mangnall Dorset North Simon Hoare Dorset West Chris Loder Droitwich and Evesham Nigel Huddleston East Grinstead and Uckfield Unknown (new seat) Essex North West Kemi Badenoch Exmouth and Exeter East Simon Jupp Fareham and Waterlooville Suella Braverman Gordon and Buchan Unknown (changed seat) Hamble Valley Unknown (new seat) Hampshire East Damian Hinds Hampshire North East Ranil Jayawardena Hampshire North West Kit Malthouse Herefordshire North Bill Wiggin Kenilworth and Southam Jeremy Wright Kingswinford and South Staffordshire Gavin Williamson Louth and Horncastle Victoria Atkins Maidenhead Theresa May Maldon John Whittingdale Melksham and Devizes Unknown (new seat) Meriden and Solihull East Saqib Bhatti Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr Craig Williams New Forest East Julian Lewis New Forest West Desmond Swayne Norfolk North Duncan Baker Old Bexley and Sidcup James Brokenshire Rayleigh and Wickford Mark Francois Reigate Crispin Blunt Richmond and Northallerton Rishi Sunak Romsey and Southampton North Caroline Nokes Runnymede and Weybridge Ben Spencer Rutland and Stamford Alicia Kearns Salisbury John Glen Sevenoaks Laura Trott Shropshire South Philip Dunne Solihull West and Shirley Julian Knight South Holland and The Deepings John Hayes Southend West and Leigh David Amess Stratford-on-Avon Nadhim Zahawi Surrey East Claire Coutinho Sussex Weald Nus Ghani Tewkesbury Laurence Robertson Tonbridge Tom Tugendhat Torbay Kevin Foster Waveney Valley Unknown (new seat) Weald of Kent Unknown (new seat) Wells and Mendip Hills James Heappey Wetherby and Easingwold Alec Shelbrooke Wiltshire East Danny Kruger Witham Priti Patel Witney Robert Courts Worcestershire West Harriett Baldwin
Micky Fab would lose to Labour by 2.0%
Thanks. Surprised that Solhull West would stay Tory, must be a split vote between Lab and LD. Also Southend West which a lot of other forecasts are saying would go Labour. Maybe they've taken the by-election as a base by mistake?
The more I think about it the more I question it. I'd be surprised if Caroline Nokes hangs on, for example, whilst I expect Penny Mordaunt to do so.
I also doubt Labour will clinch the IoW seats, although I could be wrong.
Why didn’t they dump fishy rishi after the locals? Need to go back to basics and talk common sense ! Nobody likes starmer people just want the Tory’s and rishi out !!
One thing to bear in mind: Rishi probably goes in a by-election by the Autumn anyway.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Attacking the motives of the electorate now? It shows how tone deaf you and your lot are.
If you had even a modicum of humility, instead of knee-jerk reaction you would pause, reflect, and ask yourself why the British people appear to be feeling this way.
Post less frequently and less acerbically on here. Reflect more on why the electorate is turning its back on you (pl).
You've been thinking about what I said all night, haven't you?
Good. Glad it's sunk in. Reflecting on it will do you some good.
In the 1997 Major lost 178 seats and got 30.7% of the vote. This was against Blair at his most formidable. But Major started at 343 seats compared with Sunaks 360. Even if the Tories lost the same again they would still be near 200.
Blair gained 146 seats with most of the rest going to the Lib Dem’s. Starmer repeating that is probably short of an overall majority. The Tories are going to be hammered, no doubt about it but Labour winning 476 seats from where they are? It’s ridiculous.
The Tories are polling so much worse now than they were in 1997. The last time they polled >30% was a 31% in a Savanta poll with fieldwork of 23-25 June 2023.
[…] Now, sure, the polls could be wrong. They're certainly not infallible. But the polling numbers really are that bad for the Tories and so I think, unless something changes, it really could happen. And, after Truss, after everything else, isn't the record of this Tory government a lot worse than Major's?
Yes.
I first said on here over 2 years ago that there would be a Labour landslide, to much derision at the time. I partly based this somewhat anecdotally on listening to friends and people out and about on buses, trains, and in shops.
CR may attack the electorate for wanting revenge but we have a lot to be angry about. I can just remember 1997 and it wasn’t like this. The level of anger with the governing party this time is something else.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Oh I don't know. Revenge works - an awful lot of people want to demolish the Tory party for an entertainingly large number of reasons.
What we get instead will have its own problems - we can all list them. So its not about hope, its about retribution. People want E.L.E. because they don't want a government this egregiously awful again in their lifetimes. But that's the rational side. On the emotional side people want E.L.E. because they want to punish the Tory party.
Sorry, I know the remaining 6 Tory activists hate this. I joined a LibDem party reduced to a minibus full. It isn't fun. But sometimes it is justified. And oh bioy, is this justified.
The national rejoicing the day after E.L.E. will be something utterly wonderful.
We’ve been through a difficult few years as a country. Certainly the last 8 years but arguably the last 17, since the run on Northern Rock.
It’s not fair to blame the Tories for everything, but Leviticus 16, 21-22 says it all:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
The Conservatives have been very unlucky with the pandemic and Ukraine,
The shambolic and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan almost certainly greenlit Putin on Ukraine.
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Oh I don't know. Revenge works - an awful lot of people want to demolish the Tory party for an entertainingly large number of reasons.
What we get instead will have its own problems - we can all list them. So its not about hope, its about retribution. People want E.L.E. because they don't want a government this egregiously awful again in their lifetimes. But that's the rational side. On the emotional side people want E.L.E. because they want to punish the Tory party.
Sorry, I know the remaining 6 Tory activists hate this. I joined a LibDem party reduced to a minibus full. It isn't fun. But sometimes it is justified. And oh bioy, is this justified.
The national rejoicing the day after E.L.E. will be something utterly wonderful.
We’ve been through a difficult few years as a country. Certainly the last 8 years but arguably the last 17, since the run on Northern Rock.
It’s not fair to blame the Tories for everything, but Leviticus 16, 21-22 says it all:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
The Conservatives have been very unlucky with the pandemic and Ukraine,
The shambolic and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan almost certainly greenlit Putin on Ukraine.
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
So the Conservatives are not blameless on that.
You think we should be fighting in Ukraine? To be honest, I did think at the start that perhaps we should simply because we’ll probably end up fighting the Russians at some point anyway.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Oh I don't know. Revenge works - an awful lot of people want to demolish the Tory party for an entertainingly large number of reasons.
What we get instead will have its own problems - we can all list them. So its not about hope, its about retribution. People want E.L.E. because they don't want a government this egregiously awful again in their lifetimes. But that's the rational side. On the emotional side people want E.L.E. because they want to punish the Tory party.
Sorry, I know the remaining 6 Tory activists hate this. I joined a LibDem party reduced to a minibus full. It isn't fun. But sometimes it is justified. And oh bioy, is this justified.
The national rejoicing the day after E.L.E. will be something utterly wonderful.
We’ve been through a difficult few years as a country. Certainly the last 8 years but arguably the last 17, since the run on Northern Rock.
It’s not fair to blame the Tories for everything, but Leviticus 16, 21-22 says it all:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
The Conservatives have been very unlucky with the pandemic and Ukraine,
The shambolic and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan almost certainly greenlit Putin on Ukraine.
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Oh I don't know. Revenge works - an awful lot of people want to demolish the Tory party for an entertainingly large number of reasons.
What we get instead will have its own problems - we can all list them. So its not about hope, its about retribution. People want E.L.E. because they don't want a government this egregiously awful again in their lifetimes. But that's the rational side. On the emotional side people want E.L.E. because they want to punish the Tory party.
Sorry, I know the remaining 6 Tory activists hate this. I joined a LibDem party reduced to a minibus full. It isn't fun. But sometimes it is justified. And oh bioy, is this justified.
The national rejoicing the day after E.L.E. will be something utterly wonderful.
We’ve been through a difficult few years as a country. Certainly the last 8 years but arguably the last 17, since the run on Northern Rock.
It’s not fair to blame the Tories for everything, but Leviticus 16, 21-22 says it all:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
The Conservatives have been very unlucky with the pandemic and Ukraine,
The shambolic and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan almost certainly greenlit Putin on Ukraine.
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
So the Conservatives are not blameless on that.
You think we should be fighting in Ukraine? To be honest, I did think at the start that perhaps we should simply because we’ll probably end up fighting the Russians at some point anyway.
No but I do think we should have installed a No Fly Zone from the very beginning and said so on here. That may have resulted in some aerial skirmishes until they got the message.
I think the only way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him. Yes you need courage to do that.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Attacking the motives of the electorate now? It shows how tone deaf you and your lot are.
If you had even a modicum of humility, instead of knee-jerk reaction you would pause, reflect, and ask yourself why the British people appear to be feeling this way.
Post less frequently and less acerbically on here. Reflect more on why the electorate is turning its back on you (pl).
You've been thinking about what I said all night, haven't you?
Good. Glad it's sunk in. Reflecting on it will do you some good.
No but I do think you are obsessed with me. I was going to post it last night but decided my bedtime was more important than you.
I’ve clearly got right under your skin which is why you resort to personal abuse - to me and many others on here.
You really aren’t doing a lot to disabuse us of the notion that your party is full of very nasty people.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Oh I don't know. Revenge works - an awful lot of people want to demolish the Tory party for an entertainingly large number of reasons.
What we get instead will have its own problems - we can all list them. So its not about hope, its about retribution. People want E.L.E. because they don't want a government this egregiously awful again in their lifetimes. But that's the rational side. On the emotional side people want E.L.E. because they want to punish the Tory party.
Sorry, I know the remaining 6 Tory activists hate this. I joined a LibDem party reduced to a minibus full. It isn't fun. But sometimes it is justified. And oh bioy, is this justified.
The national rejoicing the day after E.L.E. will be something utterly wonderful.
We’ve been through a difficult few years as a country. Certainly the last 8 years but arguably the last 17, since the run on Northern Rock.
It’s not fair to blame the Tories for everything, but Leviticus 16, 21-22 says it all:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
The Conservatives have been very unlucky with the pandemic and Ukraine,
The shambolic and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan almost certainly greenlit Putin on Ukraine.
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
(Some try to deny this but unsuccessfully imho and usually to try and absolve Biden)
Do you think the British Army should have stayed in Afghanistan by itself?
As you know, we were part of the shambles. Our Foreign Secretary was unavailable lazing on a beach and Boris Johnson was characteristically absent from his brief.
We should have lobbied Biden and at the very least slowed him down and put in place something more orderly, with a more clearly defined transition period.
If we hadn’t burned our bridges we might also have elicited support from other allies.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Oh I don't know. Revenge works - an awful lot of people want to demolish the Tory party for an entertainingly large number of reasons.
What we get instead will have its own problems - we can all list them. So its not about hope, its about retribution. People want E.L.E. because they don't want a government this egregiously awful again in their lifetimes. But that's the rational side. On the emotional side people want E.L.E. because they want to punish the Tory party.
Sorry, I know the remaining 6 Tory activists hate this. I joined a LibDem party reduced to a minibus full. It isn't fun. But sometimes it is justified. And oh bioy, is this justified.
The national rejoicing the day after E.L.E. will be something utterly wonderful.
We’ve been through a difficult few years as a country. Certainly the last 8 years but arguably the last 17, since the run on Northern Rock.
It’s not fair to blame the Tories for everything, but Leviticus 16, 21-22 says it all:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
The Conservatives have been very unlucky with the pandemic and Ukraine,
The shambolic and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan almost certainly greenlit Putin on Ukraine.
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
(Some try to deny this but unsuccessfully imho and usually to try and absolve Biden)
Do you think the British Army should have stayed in Afghanistan by itself?
As you know, we were part of the shambles. Our Foreign Secretary was unavailable lazing on a beach and Boris Johnson was characteristically absent from his brief.
We should have lobbied Biden and at the very least slowed him down and put in place something more orderly, with a more clearly defined transition period.
If we hadn’t burned our bridges we might also have elicited support from other allies.
So you think Biden would have listened to us and stayed in Afghanistan had Dominic Raab not been on holiday?
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Attacking the motives of the electorate now? It shows how tone deaf you and your lot are.
If you had even a modicum of humility, instead of knee-jerk reaction you would pause, reflect, and ask yourself why the British people appear to be feeling this way.
Post less frequently and less acerbically on here. Reflect more on why the electorate is turning its back on you (pl).
You've been thinking about what I said all night, haven't you?
Good. Glad it's sunk in. Reflecting on it will do you some good.
No but I do think you are obsessed with me. I was going to post it last night but decided my bedtime was more important than you.
I’ve clearly got right under your skin which is why you resort to personal abuse - to me and many others on here.
You really aren’t doing a lot to disabuse us of the notion that your party is full of very nasty people.
I actually don't give you or your posts a second thought.
Anyone have a list of the 66 seats the Tories would hold? I wonder if Micky Fab's is one of them.
Aldridge-Brownhills Wendy Morton Arundel and South Downs Andrew Griffith Beaconsfield Joy Morrissey Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk John Lamont Bicester and Woodstock Unknown (new seat) Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe Fay Jones Brentwood and Ongar Alex Burghart Brigg and Immingham Martin Vickers Buckinghamshire Mid Greg Smith Cambridgeshire North East Steve Barclay Chichester Gillian Keegan Christchurch Christopher Chope Cotswolds North Unknown (new seat) Daventry Chris Heaton-Harris Devon South Anthony Mangnall Dorset North Simon Hoare Dorset West Chris Loder Droitwich and Evesham Nigel Huddleston East Grinstead and Uckfield Unknown (new seat) Essex North West Kemi Badenoch Exmouth and Exeter East Simon Jupp Fareham and Waterlooville Suella Braverman Gordon and Buchan Unknown (changed seat) Hamble Valley Unknown (new seat) Hampshire East Damian Hinds Hampshire North East Ranil Jayawardena Hampshire North West Kit Malthouse Herefordshire North Bill Wiggin Kenilworth and Southam Jeremy Wright Kingswinford and South Staffordshire Gavin Williamson Louth and Horncastle Victoria Atkins Maidenhead Theresa May Maldon John Whittingdale Melksham and Devizes Unknown (new seat) Meriden and Solihull East Saqib Bhatti Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr Craig Williams New Forest East Julian Lewis New Forest West Desmond Swayne Norfolk North Duncan Baker Old Bexley and Sidcup James Brokenshire Rayleigh and Wickford Mark Francois Reigate Crispin Blunt Richmond and Northallerton Rishi Sunak Romsey and Southampton North Caroline Nokes Runnymede and Weybridge Ben Spencer Rutland and Stamford Alicia Kearns Salisbury John Glen Sevenoaks Laura Trott Shropshire South Philip Dunne Solihull West and Shirley Julian Knight South Holland and The Deepings John Hayes Southend West and Leigh David Amess Stratford-on-Avon Nadhim Zahawi Surrey East Claire Coutinho Sussex Weald Nus Ghani Tewkesbury Laurence Robertson Tonbridge Tom Tugendhat Torbay Kevin Foster Waveney Valley Unknown (new seat) Weald of Kent Unknown (new seat) Wells and Mendip Hills James Heappey Wetherby and Easingwold Alec Shelbrooke Wiltshire East Danny Kruger Witham Priti Patel Witney Robert Courts Worcestershire West Harriett Baldwin
Micky Fab would lose to Labour by 2.0%
Thanks Andy.
You could do worse than have a couple of quid on each of them to be next Conservative leader.
Well, maybe give Chope a swerve, but you get the idea.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Local effects moderate large demographic effects, in either direction?
You're suggesting that the Labour vote in the 66 Tory holds might be a bit higher than projected, and the Tory vote in the 476 Labour seats the same? Therefore, given the imbalance in the projected number of seats between the parties, this can only be a good thing for the Conservatives overall.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Local effects moderate large demographic effects, in either direction?
You're suggesting that the Labour vote in the 66 Tory holds might be a bit higher than projected, and the Tory vote in the 476 Labour seats the same? Therefore, given the imbalance in the projected number of seats between the parties, this can only be a good thing for the Conservatives overall.
Or in other words, a mortgage-free 70 year old living on the Isle of White is more likely to be a Labour voter than a mortgage-free 70 year old living in Peterborough.
(I see that you've provided another example above. Interesting!)
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Any model would struggle with what is going on out there. May I suggest you rely as much as anything on what people you know are saying,your own instincts, your own judgement. And bet at long odds, outrageous odds even. Allow me to recite an anecdote from my days as a pro-punter on the horses. It illustrates the value in betting long odds in extraordinary circumstances.
I was at Kempton. The weather had been hot and dry for a long time and the ground was like tinder. We were waiting for the main event which was a six runner long-distance hurdle. There were three well-matched high class horses heading the market at 15/8. The other three were donkeys, hoping to pick up some place money. They were trading at 50/1, 100/1, and 200/1 respectively. Twenty minutes before the off a summer storm broke and flooded the track. Suddenly the going was not only different, but unlike any the horses would have ever encountered. (Going is the most important factor in any horse race.) I knew it was the moment to back an outsider, but couldn't bring myself to back a donkey at three figure odds, so I bet on the 50/1 shot. The 200/1 chance came in. (It never won another race.)
May I suggest that what you have here is the political equivalent of that Kempton race, in the most exceptional of circumstances.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Any model would struggle with what is going on out there. May I suggest you rely as much as anything on what people you know are saying,your own instincts, your own judgement. And bet at long odds, outrageous odds even. Allow me to recite an anecdote from my days as a pro-punter on the horses. It illustrates the value in betting long odds in extraordinary circumstances.
I was at Kempton. The weather had been hot and dry for a long time and the ground was like tinder. We were waiting for the main event which was a six runner long-distance hurdle. There were three well-matched high class horses heading the market at 15/8. The other three were donkeys, hoping to pick up some place money. They were trading at 50/1, 100/1, and 200/1 respectively. Twenty minutes before the off a summer storm broke and flooded the track. Suddenly the going was not only different, but unlike any the horses would have ever encountered. (Going is the most important factor in any horse race.) I knew it was the moment to back an outsider, but couldn't bring myself to back a donkey at three figure odds, so I bet on the 50/1 shot. The 200/1 chance came in. (It never won another race.)
May I suggest that what you have here is the political equivalent of that Kempton race, in the most exceptional of circumstances.
Thanks Peter - I'll bear that in mind! I suppose the known unknown that could replicate your flood are the manifestos. Otherwise it would have to be a Black Swan.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Local effects moderate large demographic effects, in either direction?
You're suggesting that the Labour vote in the 66 Tory holds might be a bit higher than projected, and the Tory vote in the 476 Labour seats the same? Therefore, given the imbalance in the projected number of seats between the parties, this can only be a good thing for the Conservatives overall.
Or in other words, a mortgage-free 70 year old living on the Isle of White is more likely to be a Labour voter than a mortgage-free 70 year old living in Peterborough.
(I see that you've provided another example above. Interesting!)
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Local effects moderate large demographic effects, in either direction?
You're suggesting that the Labour vote in the 66 Tory holds might be a bit higher than projected, and the Tory vote in the 476 Labour seats the same? Therefore, given the imbalance in the projected number of seats between the parties, this can only be a good thing for the Conservatives overall.
The pollsters’ - indeed most scientists’ (doing pollsters the incidental favour of lumping them in with scientists) holy grail is that if they could get enough social and attitudinal data, they’d be able to explain how everyone voted, in aggregate.
We can see this is flawed because each of us as an individual has both personal/historical and social/economic reasons for our vote, and the former are random. The pollsters just hope they will average out. But of course, they don’t. And this isn’t just an individual thing - social groups or localities or even whole age cohorts who live through a transformative political time or event will carry the after-effect of this through their future voting life in a way that those with similar demographics coming along behind won’t share.
Remember that the most fundamental peculiarity of British voting patterns is the tendency towards UNS or ‘straight swing’; people guess as to why this is, but it’s never been explained let alone such an explanation tested. Kellner’s attempt last year was almost risible. Ironically this year’s GE will probably see the least uniform, most proportional swing of the century’s GEs.
Another way to look at it is to consider the scenario of a single person - any of us - who had the motivation, skills and resources to devote to it, could move into a seat and devote their entire life and time to campaigning there, for whatever political persuasion, and over time you’d see an impact in the electoral results for that locality, which no amount of data and no amount of sophisticated modelling could ever account for.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Any model would struggle with what is going on out there. May I suggest you rely as much as anything on what people you know are saying,your own instincts, your own judgement. And bet at long odds, outrageous odds even. Allow me to recite an anecdote from my days as a pro-punter on the horses. It illustrates the value in betting long odds in extraordinary circumstances.
I was at Kempton. The weather had been hot and dry for a long time and the ground was like tinder. We were waiting for the main event which was a six runner long-distance hurdle. There were three well-matched high class horses heading the market at 15/8. The other three were donkeys, hoping to pick up some place money. They were trading at 50/1, 100/1, and 200/1 respectively. Twenty minutes before the off a summer storm broke and flooded the track. Suddenly the going was not only different, but unlike any the horses would have ever encountered. (Going is the most important factor in any horse race.) I knew it was the moment to back an outsider, but couldn't bring myself to back a donkey at three figure odds, so I bet on the 50/1 shot. The 200/1 chance came in. (It never won another race.)
Is this the scenario where Sunak gets another five years?
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Any model would struggle with what is going on out there. May I suggest you rely as much as anything on what people you know are saying,your own instincts, your own judgement. And bet at long odds, outrageous odds even. Allow me to recite an anecdote from my days as a pro-punter on the horses. It illustrates the value in betting long odds in extraordinary circumstances.
I was at Kempton. The weather had been hot and dry for a long time and the ground was like tinder. We were waiting for the main event which was a six runner long-distance hurdle. There were three well-matched high class horses heading the market at 15/8. The other three were donkeys, hoping to pick up some place money. They were trading at 50/1, 100/1, and 200/1 respectively. Twenty minutes before the off a summer storm broke and flooded the track. Suddenly the going was not only different, but unlike any the horses would have ever encountered. (Going is the most important factor in any horse race.) I knew it was the moment to back an outsider, but couldn't bring myself to back a donkey at three figure odds, so I bet on the 50/1 shot. The 200/1 chance came in. (It never won another race.)
May I suggest that what you have here is the political equivalent of that Kempton race, in the most exceptional of circumstances.
Thanks Peter - I'll bear that in mind! I suppose the known unknown that could replicate your flood are the manifestos. Otherwise it would have to be a Black Swan.
(To hit every PB cliche).
Thanks, Eabal, but no, what I am struggling to say here is that you already have extreme conditions, i.e., the political equivalent of the flood. So look for the long shots.
This could mean backing for or against any Party. For example, in the constituency markets try to back candidates who might stand out against the swing. I'm thinking about people like Oliver Dowden and Tom Tugenhat, well-respected local MPs who have a different sort of message. I haven't checked the odds, and in any case it's a bit early to be betting individual constituencies, and of course, DYOR as always.
You can probably think of better examples, but if i have helped steer anyone the right way, I'm happy.
(And if I have steered them the wrong way, I have a very good lawyer.)
The question is will Starmer take the Thatcher approach of trying to prop up the other ‘maim’ party to support the political status quo. My sense is that many in the Labour Party like the two party system and would not actually like to see the extinction of the Tories. So I expect a lot of Labour supporters creating muddle and confusion around the tactical voting message to prop up the Tories. It will put their complaints of the last 14 years into a different perspective if they do.
Labour has been warned of an NHS staff “exodus” this summer unless it urgently sets out how its plans to reinstate tax on large pension pots will work.
The party has committed to reintroducing the lifetime allowance cap on pensions – a limit on the amount people can build in pension savings over their lifetime and still receive tax relief – having criticised the Government for removing it.
Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves pledged to reinstate the limit, but said the party would allow a work-around for NHS workers to avoid senior doctors leaving the workforce. A party spokesperson also told i earlier this year that its solution would “cover other public sector leaders”.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
There was a very thoughtful analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Trust into determinants of voting Brexit in the aftermath of the referendum.
One thing it found was how voters felt altered with their neighbours, so the well qualified were more Brexity in left behind Redwall towns, and the less qualified were more Remainery in Blue Wall shires. Each was affected by their milieu. So teachers in Winchester may well be more LibDemmy because they run into more Lib Dems as they go about their business.
I think this is the flaw in the MRP process. As well as individual determinants of voting, we are social creatures influenced by our neighbours.
This may well prevent the ELE of this MRP in those Tory bedrock seats. I would think that the Tories may well wind up with twice those 66 seats even if the polls don't shift. I think skewed to traditional heartlands rather than more recently acquired seats with big majorities, so Blue Wall rather than Red Wall.
Dan Neidle @DanNeidle This is all an uncomfortable result from my personal political perspective: I'm in favour of increased spending on public services, and that can only come from taxation.
But right now, that is a distinctly minority position.
I think it's a consequence of New Labour. They increased public spending without increasing taxation all that much. And people think that that ought to be the norm.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP approach has clearly worked very well in capturing the shifts in support due to the Brexit realignment, where the changes in support between the parties were particularly pronounced in certain demographics, and the demographics of some seats also changed - giving us Tory victories in such unlikely seats as Sedgefield. Something UNS would have completely failed to do.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
Labour has been warned of an NHS staff “exodus” this summer unless it urgently sets out how its plans to reinstate tax on large pension pots will work.
The party has committed to reintroducing the lifetime allowance cap on pensions – a limit on the amount people can build in pension savings over their lifetime and still receive tax relief – having criticised the Government for removing it.
Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves pledged to reinstate the limit, but said the party would allow a work-around for NHS workers to avoid senior doctors leaving the workforce. A party spokesperson also told i earlier this year that its solution would “cover other public sector leaders”.
One rule for them...
The problem for me and my colleagues is much more around Annual Allowance charges and tapering of these than lifetime limits. In particular the way that the 1995 scheme (which I have 30 years of membership in) calculates the annual input value. In other words really quite technical. A Lifetime Allowance set at the old limit plus CPI since wouldn't be such a problem.
What I have heard colleagues get nervous about is taxation of lump sums, which have current limits of 25% of the pot or £238 000, whichever is lower.
The rules change that came in last October on partial retirement make it a lot easier for senior clinicians to take their pension, but to continue part time (up to 90% WTE). This is part of scheme rules rather than tax policy.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
There was a very thoughtful analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Trust into determinants of voting Brexit in the aftermath of the referendum.
One thing it found was how voters felt altered with their neighbours, so the well qualified were more Brexity in left behind Redwall towns, and the less qualified were more Remainery in Blue Wall shires. Each was affected by their milieu. So teachers in Winchester may well be more LibDemmy because they run into more Lib Dems as they go about their business.
I think this is the flaw in the MRP process. As well as individual determinants of voting, we are social creatures influenced by our neighbours.
This may well prevent the ELE of this MRP in those Tory bedrock seats. I would think that the Tories may well wind up with twice those 66 seats even if the polls don't shift. I think skewed to traditional heartlands rather than more recently acquired seats with big majorities, so Blue Wall rather than Red Wall.
At the peak of Reform's recent polling bubble, we saw Reform overtake the Tories in some demographic sub-samples, and so this effect may also act to make Reform's support more sticky than we might otherwise expect.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP approach has clearly worked very well in capturing the shifts in support due to the Brexit realignment, where the changes in support between the parties were particularly pronounced in certain demographics, and the demographics of some seats also changed - giving us Tory victories in such unlikely seats as Sedgefield. Something UNS would have completely failed to do.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
Yes, that's a good point. MRP is fetishised now because it once got it almost bang-on, but it's not an exit poll or an iron-law of nature.
It might not necessarily be quite so accurate this time if demographics aren't the primary predictor.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Oh I don't know. Revenge works - an awful lot of people want to demolish the Tory party for an entertainingly large number of reasons.
What we get instead will have its own problems - we can all list them. So its not about hope, its about retribution. People want E.L.E. because they don't want a government this egregiously awful again in their lifetimes. But that's the rational side. On the emotional side people want E.L.E. because they want to punish the Tory party.
Sorry, I know the remaining 6 Tory activists hate this. I joined a LibDem party reduced to a minibus full. It isn't fun. But sometimes it is justified. And oh bioy, is this justified.
The national rejoicing the day after E.L.E. will be something utterly wonderful.
We’ve been through a difficult few years as a country. Certainly the last 8 years but arguably the last 17, since the run on Northern Rock.
It’s not fair to blame the Tories for everything, but Leviticus 16, 21-22 says it all:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
The Conservatives have been very unlucky with the pandemic and Ukraine,
The shambolic and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan almost certainly greenlit Putin on Ukraine.
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
(Some try to deny this but unsuccessfully imho and usually to try and absolve Biden)
Do you think the British Army should have stayed in Afghanistan by itself?
As you know, we were part of the shambles. Our Foreign Secretary was unavailable lazing on a beach and Boris Johnson was characteristically absent from his brief.
We should have lobbied Biden and at the very least slowed him down and put in place something more orderly, with a more clearly defined transition period.
If we hadn’t burned our bridges we might also have elicited support from other allies.
So you think Biden would have listened to us and stayed in Afghanistan had Dominic Raab not been on holiday?
Almost all evacuations have an element of shambles about them. An organised withdrawal is incredibly difficult - you need to shrink a perimeter in a controlled fashion while funnelling resources through a choke point.
That’s hard enough with military only, but add in a nervous civilian population, a plane full of dogs and the full glare of modern media it actually went off extraordinarily well.
The question is will Starmer take the Thatcher approach of trying to prop up the other ‘maim’ party to support the political status quo. My sense is that many in the Labour Party like the two party system and would not actually like to see the extinction of the Tories. So I expect a lot of Labour supporters creating muddle and confusion around the tactical voting message to prop up the Tories. It will put their complaints of the last 14 years into a different perspective if they do.
It's not what I'm hearing. A lot of my left leaning friends would be happy to see the Tories gone and the right split for a generation or more. After all, for most of the post-war period it could be argued that the left majority has been split between Labour, Liberals/LDs, and also latterly the Greens. It would be nice to see the boot on the other foot.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
There was a very thoughtful analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Trust into determinants of voting Brexit in the aftermath of the referendum.
One thing it found was how voters felt altered with their neighbours, so the well qualified were more Brexity in left behind Redwall towns, and the less qualified were more Remainery in Blue Wall shires. Each was affected by their milieu. So teachers in Winchester may well be more LibDemmy because they run into more Lib Dems as they go about their business.
I think this is the flaw in the MRP process. As well as individual determinants of voting, we are social creatures influenced by our neighbours.
This may well prevent the ELE of this MRP in those Tory bedrock seats. I would think that the Tories may well wind up with twice those 66 seats even if the polls don't shift. I think skewed to traditional heartlands rather than more recently acquired seats with big majorities, so Blue Wall rather than Red Wall.
And this is of course the traditional, now very long-standing, attempt at explaining UNS: that when people are moving away from a party, those in seats where they are surrounded by other party supporters are to an extent insulated from the discontent, whereas those living in opposition strongholds feel beleaguered, forever meeting people slagging off the government. Hence the Tory vote (only) drops from 60% to 55% in Sevenoaks but from 35% to 30% in Sunderland.
I first came across this hypothesis over forty years ago, and struggle with it particularly in a modern context. Seats are fairly small, and with modern mobility and working patterns, how realistic is it to think that our pattern of social contact is determined by our constituency, especially in an urban context where you’re talking slices of a city? In the workplace, our colleagues will be from whole swathes of seats. And didn’t Brexit show that we all mix in our bubbles of the like-minded, anyway? Especially with social media and the rest.
That someone as experienced and respected as Kellner could only try to explain UNS - which in essence is the tendency for similar absolute numbers of voters to change in each seat - by suggesting that there is a certain type of person called a ‘floating voter’, whom (for some unexplained reason) are distributed evenly across the country (when almost every other type of voter is not!) was clearly the ultimate circular argument, and an intellectual fail.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP approach has clearly worked very well in capturing the shifts in support due to the Brexit realignment, where the changes in support between the parties were particularly pronounced in certain demographics, and the demographics of some seats also changed - giving us Tory victories in such unlikely seats as Sedgefield. Something UNS would have completely failed to do.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
Yes, that's a good point. MRP is fetishised now because it once got it almost bang-on, but it's not an exit poll or an iron-law of nature.
It might not necessarily be quite so accurate this time if demographics aren't the primary predictor.
Isn't a big part of it that it's just a function of the underlying polling? If Labour are 25 points ahead of the Tories, it's likely going to be a huge Labour landslide. The real value of the MRP is looking for nuance in how the seats will fall. But, if there is a huge swing, it seems pretty pointless trying to be too precise.
One thing to look out for is a swing from Labour to the Lib Dems. It happened in 1997 and I'd expect it to happen this time. I'm not sure if there have been any polls like this yet, but I'd also like to see some polling that asks "thinking specifically about your constituency, how will you vote?"
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP approach has clearly worked very well in capturing the shifts in support due to the Brexit realignment, where the changes in support between the parties were particularly pronounced in certain demographics, and the demographics of some seats also changed - giving us Tory victories in such unlikely seats as Sedgefield. Something UNS would have completely failed to do.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
Yes, that's a good point. MRP is fetishised now because it once got it almost bang-on, but it's not an exit poll or an iron-law of nature.
It might not necessarily be quite so accurate this time if demographics aren't the primary predictor.
All good points. That is the fun of a GE, it's like sport: a drama unfolding for which the ending is not yet written. I love elections!
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Oh I don't know. Revenge works - an awful lot of people want to demolish the Tory party for an entertainingly large number of reasons.
What we get instead will have its own problems - we can all list them. So its not about hope, its about retribution. People want E.L.E. because they don't want a government this egregiously awful again in their lifetimes. But that's the rational side. On the emotional side people want E.L.E. because they want to punish the Tory party.
Sorry, I know the remaining 6 Tory activists hate this. I joined a LibDem party reduced to a minibus full. It isn't fun. But sometimes it is justified. And oh bioy, is this justified.
The national rejoicing the day after E.L.E. will be something utterly wonderful.
We’ve been through a difficult few years as a country. Certainly the last 8 years but arguably the last 17, since the run on Northern Rock.
It’s not fair to blame the Tories for everything, but Leviticus 16, 21-22 says it all:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
The Conservatives have been very unlucky with the pandemic and Ukraine,
The shambolic and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan almost certainly greenlit Putin on Ukraine.
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
(Some try to deny this but unsuccessfully imho and usually to try and absolve Biden)
Do you think the British Army should have stayed in Afghanistan by itself?
As you know, we were part of the shambles. Our Foreign Secretary was unavailable lazing on a beach and Boris Johnson was characteristically absent from his brief.
We should have lobbied Biden and at the very least slowed him down and put in place something more orderly, with a more clearly defined transition period.
If we hadn’t burned our bridges we might also have elicited support from other allies.
So you think Biden would have listened to us and stayed in Afghanistan had Dominic Raab not been on holiday?
Almost all evacuations have an element of shambles about them. An organised withdrawal is incredibly difficult - you need to shrink a perimeter in a controlled fashion while funnelling resources through a choke point.
That’s hard enough with military only, but add in a nervous civilian population, a plane full of dogs and the full glare of modern media it actually went off extraordinarily well.
It could have been so much worse…
Yes, and I don't think we've had the resources to fight a solo operation in Afghanistan since the 1950s.
66 seats even on this MRP poll (which includes tactical voting too) would NOT be an extinction level event for the Tories on any definition.
The Conservatives would still be the main Opposition, still ahead of Reform on voteshare and still ahead of the LDs on seats.
An extinction level event would be the Tories ceasing to be the main opposition with the LDs overtaking them on seats AND Reform overtaking the Tories on voteshare to become the main party of the right in the UK
What if 67 lefty Labour MPs of the 476 decided to hive off into the "Real Labour Beer and Sandwiches Party" and made themselves the official opposition?
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
I wonder why? Maybe it’s because the Tories and their obsessions have simply not addressed the nation’s concerns. And after being huckstered by BoZo, the people have got an XXXL sized dose of buyers remorse.
They let in 2m migrants in 3 years. An act of such astounding irresponsibility, so evilly reckless, so utterly unasked for, so obviously unmandated, I want the Tories destroyed forever. I want them pulped into nothing. I want them turned into political atoms and dispersed by the solar winds
It's quite something that the Conservatives have destroyed both their right and left flank.
If you're a small state, social liberal, the party left you a decade ago.
If you're a small c, statist conservative worried about immigration, as you say, the 2m immigrants in the last 2 years say hi.
Who is the modern conservative party for, exactly?
Home owners, without mortgages, who like mass migration.
An interesting venn diagram (with a very small intersection I imagine!)
The country has been ruined thanks to around 150k of aging pensioner tory members who have given us Johnson, Truss and Sunak in succession. They are completely out of touch with the modern world and their party is about to be battered.
The fundamental problem is the tory membership. It is not a mass party representing various walks of life any more.
What's interesting, though, is that you think Labour is winning because it's representing the common man, others because it does the youth, others because they think SKS is a secret socialist, others because they think he's the real Tory and others because they think he'll get a serious grasp on migration.
He's quite happy for all of you to project at the moment, and garner your votes, but some of you are going to be disappointed.
Most people on this site agree with you. If you want to win this election you need to get out and persuade those who don’t.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP approach has clearly worked very well in capturing the shifts in support due to the Brexit realignment, where the changes in support between the parties were particularly pronounced in certain demographics, and the demographics of some seats also changed - giving us Tory victories in such unlikely seats as Sedgefield. Something UNS would have completely failed to do.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
Yes, that's a good point. MRP is fetishised now because it once got it almost bang-on, but it's not an exit poll or an iron-law of nature.
It might not necessarily be quite so accurate this time if demographics aren't the primary predictor.
Isn't a big part of it that it's just a function of the underlying polling? If Labour are 25 points ahead of the Tories, it's likely going to be a huge Labour landslide. The real value of the MRP is looking for nuance in how the seats will fall. But, if there is a huge swing, it seems pretty pointless trying to be too precise.
One thing to look out for is a swing from Labour to the Lib Dems. It happened in 1997 and I'd expect it to happen this time. I'm not sure if there have been any polls like this yet, but I'd also like to see some polling that asks "thinking specifically about your constituency, how will you vote?"
Yes, it will naturally happen as Labour voters realise the LDs are the primary challenger in certain seats.
However, there's a natural counterweight to that: if the Labour lead is absolutely vast then they become a credible challenger virtually everywhere and that, in turn, will keep the LD vote suppressed as left-wing voters revert to their primary preferred choice.
Posting from my hotel bed as i cannot resist even though i'm away, lol. Some things to consider re this MRP. Fieldwork was 20 May to 27 May, so 3/7ths before the election was called. Results were 46/19 so high end Lab, low end Tory, ameliorated by them blending recent poll average at 45/23. Lets say its assuming a 24 point lead overall. DKs have been reallocated on the same basis as the way 2019 voters say they will vote now who select a party, proportionately. All considered, i'd treat this (negative Tory movement from here notwithstanding) as worst possible case scenario.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
There was a very thoughtful analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Trust into determinants of voting Brexit in the aftermath of the referendum.
One thing it found was how voters felt altered with their neighbours, so the well qualified were more Brexity in left behind Redwall towns, and the less qualified were more Remainery in Blue Wall shires. Each was affected by their milieu. So teachers in Winchester may well be more LibDemmy because they run into more Lib Dems as they go about their business.
I think this is the flaw in the MRP process. As well as individual determinants of voting, we are social creatures influenced by our neighbours.
This may well prevent the ELE of this MRP in those Tory bedrock seats. I would think that the Tories may well wind up with twice those 66 seats even if the polls don't shift. I think skewed to traditional heartlands rather than more recently acquired seats with big majorities, so Blue Wall rather than Red Wall.
And this is of course the traditional, now very long-standing, attempt at explaining UNS: that when people are moving away from a party, those in seats where they are surrounded by other party supporters are to an extent insulated from the discontent, whereas those living in opposition strongholds feel beleaguered, forever meeting people slagging off the government. Hence the Tory vote (only) drops from 60% to 55% in Sevenoaks but from 35% to 30% in Sunderland.
I first came across this hypothesis over forty years ago, and struggle with it particularly in a modern context. Seats are fairly small, and with modern mobility and working patterns, how realistic is it to think that our pattern of social contact is determined by our constituency, especially in an urban context where you’re talking slices of a city? In the workplace, our colleagues will be from whole swathes of seats. And didn’t Brexit show that we all mix in our bubbles of the like-minded, anyway? Especially with social media and the rest.
That someone as experienced and respected as Kellner could only try to explain UNS - which in essence is the tendency for similar absolute numbers of voters to change in each seat - by suggesting that there is a certain type of person called a ‘floating voter’, whom (for some unexplained reason) are distributed evenly across the country (when almost every other type of voter is not!) was clearly the ultimate circular argument, and an intellectual fail.
This is the JRF foundation report that I mentioned:
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Oh I don't know. Revenge works - an awful lot of people want to demolish the Tory party for an entertainingly large number of reasons.
What we get instead will have its own problems - we can all list them. So its not about hope, its about retribution. People want E.L.E. because they don't want a government this egregiously awful again in their lifetimes. But that's the rational side. On the emotional side people want E.L.E. because they want to punish the Tory party.
Sorry, I know the remaining 6 Tory activists hate this. I joined a LibDem party reduced to a minibus full. It isn't fun. But sometimes it is justified. And oh bioy, is this justified.
The national rejoicing the day after E.L.E. will be something utterly wonderful.
We’ve been through a difficult few years as a country. Certainly the last 8 years but arguably the last 17, since the run on Northern Rock.
It’s not fair to blame the Tories for everything, but Leviticus 16, 21-22 says it all:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
The Conservatives have been very unlucky with the pandemic and Ukraine,
The shambolic and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan almost certainly greenlit Putin on Ukraine.
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
(Some try to deny this but unsuccessfully imho and usually to try and absolve Biden)
On the other hand, May did a rather good job in getting an international consensus on further sanctions on Russia after Salisbury - something certain countries were not keen on.
And the west's appeasement (yes, that word again...) of Russia goes back much further than the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Georgia in 2008 was a warning sign that was ignored, as was Litvinenko and others. Russia did something bad, and 'we' just clucked and, at best, threw a few small sanctions their way.
Putin is a fascist and an imperialist. History has shown us how such people behave, and yet many choose to ignore it.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP approach has clearly worked very well in capturing the shifts in support due to the Brexit realignment, where the changes in support between the parties were particularly pronounced in certain demographics, and the demographics of some seats also changed - giving us Tory victories in such unlikely seats as Sedgefield. Something UNS would have completely failed to do.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
Yes, that's a good point. MRP is fetishised now because it once got it almost bang-on, but it's not an exit poll or an iron-law of nature.
It might not necessarily be quite so accurate this time if demographics aren't the primary predictor.
Isn't a big part of it that it's just a function of the underlying polling? If Labour are 25 points ahead of the Tories, it's likely going to be a huge Labour landslide. The real value of the MRP is looking for nuance in how the seats will fall. But, if there is a huge swing, it seems pretty pointless trying to be too precise.
One thing to look out for is a swing from Labour to the Lib Dems. It happened in 1997 and I'd expect it to happen this time. I'm not sure if there have been any polls like this yet, but I'd also like to see some polling that asks "thinking specifically about your constituency, how will you vote?"
Not sure there was a Lab to LD swing in 1997, in fact quite the opposite. In individual seats for tactical reasons there may have been but overall the LD vote fell. There was a definite Lab to LD swing in 2005 and 2010 evidenced by the Lib Dem’s picking up some Labour seats.
Posting from my hotel bed as i cannot resist even though i'm away, lol. Some things to consider re this MRP. Fieldwork was 20 May to 27 May, so 3/7ths before the election was called. Results were 46/19 so high end Lab, low end Tory, ameliorated by them blending recent poll average at 46/23. Lets say its assuming a 24 point lead overall. DKs have beem reallocated on the same basis as the way 2019 voters say they will vote now who select a party, proportionately. All considered, i'd treat this (negative Tory movement from here notwithstanding) as worst possible case scenario.
Doing the same here (different bed obvs.) - what saddos we are.
I'd treat it as a 'best' case scenario but otherwise all good points.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
Unlike 1997 this is an election motivated by revenge, not hope.
And not healthy.
Oh I don't know. Revenge works - an awful lot of people want to demolish the Tory party for an entertainingly large number of reasons.
What we get instead will have its own problems - we can all list them. So its not about hope, its about retribution. People want E.L.E. because they don't want a government this egregiously awful again in their lifetimes. But that's the rational side. On the emotional side people want E.L.E. because they want to punish the Tory party.
Sorry, I know the remaining 6 Tory activists hate this. I joined a LibDem party reduced to a minibus full. It isn't fun. But sometimes it is justified. And oh bioy, is this justified.
The national rejoicing the day after E.L.E. will be something utterly wonderful.
We’ve been through a difficult few years as a country. Certainly the last 8 years but arguably the last 17, since the run on Northern Rock.
It’s not fair to blame the Tories for everything, but Leviticus 16, 21-22 says it all:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
The Conservatives have been very unlucky with the pandemic and Ukraine,
The shambolic and catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan almost certainly greenlit Putin on Ukraine.
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
(Some try to deny this but unsuccessfully imho and usually to try and absolve Biden)
Do you think the British Army should have stayed in Afghanistan by itself?
As you know, we were part of the shambles. Our Foreign Secretary was unavailable lazing on a beach and Boris Johnson was characteristically absent from his brief.
We should have lobbied Biden and at the very least slowed him down and put in place something more orderly, with a more clearly defined transition period.
If we hadn’t burned our bridges we might also have elicited support from other allies.
So you think Biden would have listened to us and stayed in Afghanistan had Dominic Raab not been on holiday?
Almost all evacuations have an element of shambles about them. An organised withdrawal is incredibly difficult - you need to shrink a perimeter in a controlled fashion while funnelling resources through a choke point.
That’s hard enough with military only, but add in a nervous civilian population, a plane full of dogs and the full glare of modern media it actually went off extraordinarily well.
It could have been so much worse…
Yes, and I don't think we've had the resources to fight a solo operation in Afghanistan since the 1950s.
Not even then
The terrain and political culture there means that you can over ever have a tentative suzerainty over largely independent tribal groupings.
It’s just not feasible to control the country with military force.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
There was a very thoughtful analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Trust into determinants of voting Brexit in the aftermath of the referendum.
One thing it found was how voters felt altered with their neighbours, so the well qualified were more Brexity in left behind Redwall towns, and the less qualified were more Remainery in Blue Wall shires. Each was affected by their milieu. So teachers in Winchester may well be more LibDemmy because they run into more Lib Dems as they go about their business.
I think this is the flaw in the MRP process. As well as individual determinants of voting, we are social creatures influenced by our neighbours.
This may well prevent the ELE of this MRP in those Tory bedrock seats. I would think that the Tories may well wind up with twice those 66 seats even if the polls don't shift. I think skewed to traditional heartlands rather than more recently acquired seats with big majorities, so Blue Wall rather than Red Wall.
At the peak of Reform's recent polling bubble, we saw Reform overtake the Tories in some demographic sub-samples, and so this effect may also act to make Reform's support more sticky than we might otherwise expect.
The other thing that makes Reform vote sticky is the Conspiracy Theory Counterculture, which includes some surprising elements of previous counterculture. This isn't MAGA land yet, but does explain why Reform voters are so pro-Trump. Our imagined communities that influence us are not just the people we see in the shop, but international on Social Media.
Posting from my hotel bed as i cannot resist even though i'm away, lol. Some things to consider re this MRP. Fieldwork was 20 May to 27 May, so 3/7ths before the election was called. Results were 46/19 so high end Lab, low end Tory, ameliorated by them blending recent poll average at 46/23. Lets say its assuming a 24 point lead overall. DKs have beem reallocated on the same basis as the way 2019 voters say they will vote now who select a party, proportionately. All considered, i'd treat this (negative Tory movement from here notwithstanding) as worst possible case scenario.
Doing the same here (different bed obvs.) - what saddos we are.
I'd treat it as a 'best' case scenario but otherwise all good points.
Lol, yes by 'worst' i meant from blue perspective, not the nations And i can confirm its a different bed, i am quite alone!!
The oddest thing about Aaron’s resignation letter was the pop at the Environment Agency re: Walley’s Quarry.
Regulation is at the heart of the issue. You cannot moan about the failure of a regulator to deliver effective regulation when you and your party routinely denigrate regulation as evil red tape that ties honest businesses in knots. The Tory Government that Aaron supports has promoted a culture of ineffective regulation. The Environment Agency and other environmental regulators are not encouraged to do their jobs effectively.
This failure to recognise the appropriate balance between enterprise and regulation has consequences, such as the shit in rivers crisis. Which has cost them many votes.
And it’s one of the main reasons I will never vote Tory.
This move by Putin is interesting, given the role of the precursors of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia in the ending of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
"The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation has declared the Movement of Spouses of Mobilized Russian Soldiers a "Way Home" - a Foreign Agent
Authorities have assigned the status of a "foreign agent" to the "Way Home" movement, whose activists are demanding the return of mobilized from the battlefield and an end to the war with Ukraine. The Ministry of Justice said that the organization had been spreading "inaccurate information aimed at creating a negative image" about Russia and its armed forces, as well as materials from "foreign agents"."
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP approach has clearly worked very well in capturing the shifts in support due to the Brexit realignment, where the changes in support between the parties were particularly pronounced in certain demographics, and the demographics of some seats also changed - giving us Tory victories in such unlikely seats as Sedgefield. Something UNS would have completely failed to do.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
Absolutely - spotting that Canterbury might go Labour and Kensington Tory were YouGov MRP successes, both greeted sceptically on here when they first appeared (including by me in respect of Kensington) - with hindsight we can see how both were credible, but at the time it took demographic modelling to identify the possibility. Neither were based on local track record or campaigning, which tends to guide (and probably over-influence) us politicos.
The oddest thing about Aaron’s resignation letter was the pop at the Environment Agency re: Walley’s Quarry.
Regulation is at the heart of the issue. You cannot moan about the failure of a regulator to deliver effective regulation when you and your party routinely denigrate regulation as evil red tape that ties honest businesses in knots. The Tory Government that Aaron supports has promoted a culture of ineffective regulation. The Environment Agency and other environmental regulators are not encouraged to do their jobs effectively.
This failure to recognise the appropriate balance between enterprise and regulation has consequences, such as the shit in rivers crisis. Which has cost them many votes.
And it’s one of the main reasons I will never vote Tory.
I'm still of the belief that the 'shit in the rivers crisis' is mostly invented. Yes, there's too much pollution being sent in, but is it really much more than before, given the way that reporting the incidents has changed?
(Not that I'm calling for progress on stopping this shit from happening.)
44 pieces of Russian artillery claimed hit yesterday. That is a big number - and might suggest that the Ukrainians are now using western weapons to hit them from firing positions inside Russia.
It's clear who the real Nazis are, whatever some on here say...
I must have missed the regular Putin supporters on this site. Save for our regular bots. Who TF are you talking about??? No one (with the above exceptions) on here is calling the Ukrainians Nazis.
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
There are two very clear differences between Labour and the Conservatives. There is not nearly the same personal attachment to the Conservative Party as there is to the Labour Party. It doesn't matter how bonkers the Labour Party are, 30% of the electorate will vote for them. The same is not true of the Conservative Party.
Secondly, the Labour vote is concentrated in urban areas. In 1997, the Conservatives (with 31.5% of the GB vote) won over 50% of the vote in 13 seats. In 2010, Labour (with 29.7% of the GB vote) won over 50% of the vote in 49 seats in England alone.
However, it is also worth remembering that tactical voting doesn't work so well when there is a large swing to Labour:
Simply, voters won't realise that their seat is now a marginal and, even if they do, working out how to vote is quite tricky as the Labour vote rises. Add into the mix that the Lib Dems were second last time in quite a few seats that are perhaps better bets for Labour, and the picture is made even less clear.
The really big unknown is Reform. Ukip were overstated in 2017. I think Reform will be too this time, but I'm not all that confident.
Will people see these seat predictions and decide to vote Tory to temper the size of the majority? I'm far from certain. One thing I would note is that after 1997, the Tories were in quite a vulnerable position. Had the electorate been minded to, the Tories could easily have been replaced by the Lib Dems as the opposition. But that didn't happen. Maybe enough voters will want to ensure a centre-right party is the opposition to keep Labour in check.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
I wonder why? Maybe it’s because the Tories and their obsessions have simply not addressed the nation’s concerns. And after being huckstered by BoZo, the people have got an XXXL sized dose of buyers remorse.
They let in 2m migrants in 3 years. An act of such astounding irresponsibility, so evilly reckless, so utterly unasked for, so obviously unmandated, I want the Tories destroyed forever. I want them pulped into nothing. I want them turned into political atoms and dispersed by the solar winds
It's quite something that the Conservatives have destroyed both their right and left flank.
If you're a small state, social liberal, the party left you a decade ago.
If you're a small c, statist conservative worried about immigration, as you say, the 2m immigrants in the last 2 years say hi.
Who is the modern conservative party for, exactly?
Home owners, without mortgages, who like mass migration.
An interesting venn diagram (with a very small intersection I imagine!)
The country has been ruined thanks to around 150k of aging pensioner tory members who have given us Johnson, Truss and Sunak in succession. They are completely out of touch with the modern world and their party is about to be battered.
The fundamental problem is the tory membership. It is not a mass party representing various walks of life any more.
What's interesting, though, is that you think Labour is winning because it's representing the common man, others because it does the youth, others because they think SKS is a secret socialist, others because they think he's the real Tory and others because they think he'll get a serious grasp on migration.
He's quite happy for all of you to project at the moment, and garner your votes, but some of you are going to be disappointed.
Hard though it is it believe, there are still people voting Tory thinking that they’re the non-ideologically driven, pragmatic party of sound money, good economic judgement, integrity in public life and down-to-earth common sense…..
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP approach has clearly worked very well in capturing the shifts in support due to the Brexit realignment, where the changes in support between the parties were particularly pronounced in certain demographics, and the demographics of some seats also changed - giving us Tory victories in such unlikely seats as Sedgefield. Something UNS would have completely failed to do.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
Yes, that's a good point. MRP is fetishised now because it once got it almost bang-on, but it's not an exit poll or an iron-law of nature.
It might not necessarily be quite so accurate this time if demographics aren't the primary predictor.
Isn't a big part of it that it's just a function of the underlying polling? If Labour are 25 points ahead of the Tories, it's likely going to be a huge Labour landslide. The real value of the MRP is looking for nuance in how the seats will fall. But, if there is a huge swing, it seems pretty pointless trying to be too precise.
One thing to look out for is a swing from Labour to the Lib Dems. It happened in 1997 and I'd expect it to happen this time. I'm not sure if there have been any polls like this yet, but I'd also like to see some polling that asks "thinking specifically about your constituency, how will you vote?"
Not sure there was a Lab to LD swing in 1997, in fact quite the opposite. In individual seats for tactical reasons there may have been but overall the LD vote fell. There was a definite Lab to LD swing in 2005 and 2010 evidenced by the Lib Dem’s picking up some Labour seats.
In the 1997 Major lost 178 seats and got 30.7% of the vote. This was against Blair at his most formidable. But Major started at 343 seats compared with Sunaks 360. Even if the Tories lost the same again they would still be near 200.
Blair gained 146 seats with most of the rest going to the Lib Dem’s. Starmer repeating that is probably short of an overall majority. The Tories are going to be hammered, no doubt about it but Labour winning 476 seats from where they are? It’s ridiculous.
Would be funny though, you've got to admit.
I'm looking forward to an election night Portillofest!
Are you an elector in Huddersfield? And did you mean an election night Portaloo-fest? (See previous comment below.)
I think I'm the only poster in Huddersfield itself, though we have a decent West Yorkshire contingent, Slade next door in Colne Valley, David Herdson in Ossett & Denby Dale, Sandy Rentool was in Shipley, not sure if the boundary has moved for him, Morris Dancer iirc is Leeds based, not sure where, Northern Monkey in iirc, Pontefract &C.
Certain I've missed a few and can't think of a Calderdale poster.
I'm close enough to check whether they make a better job of that polling station this time out, and also if the portaloo swings significantly to the left this time out!
Yes, we are still in Shipley constituency. Voting to get rid of Sir Philip.
The oddest thing about Aaron’s resignation letter was the pop at the Environment Agency re: Walley’s Quarry.
Regulation is at the heart of the issue. You cannot moan about the failure of a regulator to deliver effective regulation when you and your party routinely denigrate regulation as evil red tape that ties honest businesses in knots. The Tory Government that Aaron supports has promoted a culture of ineffective regulation. The Environment Agency and other environmental regulators are not encouraged to do their jobs effectively.
This failure to recognise the appropriate balance between enterprise and regulation has consequences, such as the shit in rivers crisis. Which has cost them many votes.
And it’s one of the main reasons I will never vote Tory.
I'm still of the belief that the 'shit in the rivers crisis' is mostly invented. Yes, there's too much pollution being sent in, but is it really much more than before, given the way that reporting the incidents has changed?
(Not that I'm calling for progress on stopping this shit from happening.)
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP approach has clearly worked very well in capturing the shifts in support due to the Brexit realignment, where the changes in support between the parties were particularly pronounced in certain demographics, and the demographics of some seats also changed - giving us Tory victories in such unlikely seats as Sedgefield. Something UNS would have completely failed to do.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
Yes, that's a good point. MRP is fetishised now because it once got it almost bang-on, but it's not an exit poll or an iron-law of nature.
It might not necessarily be quite so accurate this time if demographics aren't the primary predictor.
Isn't a big part of it that it's just a function of the underlying polling? If Labour are 25 points ahead of the Tories, it's likely going to be a huge Labour landslide. The real value of the MRP is looking for nuance in how the seats will fall. But, if there is a huge swing, it seems pretty pointless trying to be too precise.
One thing to look out for is a swing from Labour to the Lib Dems. It happened in 1997 and I'd expect it to happen this time. I'm not sure if there have been any polls like this yet, but I'd also like to see some polling that asks "thinking specifically about your constituency, how will you vote?"
Not sure there was a Lab to LD swing in 1997, in fact quite the opposite. In individual seats for tactical reasons there may have been but overall the LD vote fell. There was a definite Lab to LD swing in 2005 and 2010 evidenced by the Lib Dem’s picking up some Labour seats.
As I have said often, if there’s a strong push toward tactical anti-Tory voting, you’d expect the LibDem vote share to fall, as there are more seats where their voters need to go Labour than there are where Labour voters need to switch LibDem. And, I would suggest, where the LibDems are challenging, they probably already have a good deal of tactical support in their base.
The worst signal for the Tories is that right wingers on here are looking at these apocalyptic polls and shrugging and saying “meh, whatevs, they deserve it”
Almost everyone has deserted them
I wonder why? Maybe it’s because the Tories and their obsessions have simply not addressed the nation’s concerns. And after being huckstered by BoZo, the people have got an XXXL sized dose of buyers remorse.
They let in 2m migrants in 3 years. An act of such astounding irresponsibility, so evilly reckless, so utterly unasked for, so obviously unmandated, I want the Tories destroyed forever. I want them pulped into nothing. I want them turned into political atoms and dispersed by the solar winds
It's quite something that the Conservatives have destroyed both their right and left flank.
If you're a small state, social liberal, the party left you a decade ago.
If you're a small c, statist conservative worried about immigration, as you say, the 2m immigrants in the last 2 years say hi.
Who is the modern conservative party for, exactly?
Home owners, without mortgages, who like mass migration.
An interesting venn diagram (with a very small intersection I imagine!)
The country has been ruined thanks to around 150k of aging pensioner tory members who have given us Johnson, Truss and Sunak in succession. They are completely out of touch with the modern world and their party is about to be battered.
The fundamental problem is the tory membership. It is not a mass party representing various walks of life any more.
What's interesting, though, is that you think Labour is winning because it's representing the common man, others because it does the youth, others because they think SKS is a secret socialist, others because they think he's the real Tory and others because they think he'll get a serious grasp on migration.
He's quite happy for all of you to project at the moment, and garner your votes, but some of you are going to be disappointed.
Hard though it is it believe, there are still people voting Tory thinking that they’re the non-ideologically driven, pragmatic party of sound money, good economic judgement, integrity in public life and down-to-earth common sense…..
There is no party of sound money any more. The Tories worship at the shrine of Maggie in so many ways, but completely ignore that what she did was based on sound money (aided by windfalls from North Sea Oil and privatisations). That had to come before tax cuts.
The oddest thing about Aaron’s resignation letter was the pop at the Environment Agency re: Walley’s Quarry.
Regulation is at the heart of the issue. You cannot moan about the failure of a regulator to deliver effective regulation when you and your party routinely denigrate regulation as evil red tape that ties honest businesses in knots. The Tory Government that Aaron supports has promoted a culture of ineffective regulation. The Environment Agency and other environmental regulators are not encouraged to do their jobs effectively.
This failure to recognise the appropriate balance between enterprise and regulation has consequences, such as the shit in rivers crisis. Which has cost them many votes.
And it’s one of the main reasons I will never vote Tory.
I'm still of the belief that the 'shit in the rivers crisis' is mostly invented. Yes, there's too much pollution being sent in, but is it really much more than before, given the way that reporting the incidents has changed?
(Not that I'm calling for progress on stopping this shit from happening.)
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
The MRP approach has clearly worked very well in capturing the shifts in support due to the Brexit realignment, where the changes in support between the parties were particularly pronounced in certain demographics, and the demographics of some seats also changed - giving us Tory victories in such unlikely seats as Sedgefield. Something UNS would have completely failed to do.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
Yes, that's a good point. MRP is fetishised now because it once got it almost bang-on, but it's not an exit poll or an iron-law of nature.
It might not necessarily be quite so accurate this time if demographics aren't the primary predictor.
Isn't a big part of it that it's just a function of the underlying polling? If Labour are 25 points ahead of the Tories, it's likely going to be a huge Labour landslide. The real value of the MRP is looking for nuance in how the seats will fall. But, if there is a huge swing, it seems pretty pointless trying to be too precise.
One thing to look out for is a swing from Labour to the Lib Dems. It happened in 1997 and I'd expect it to happen this time. I'm not sure if there have been any polls like this yet, but I'd also like to see some polling that asks "thinking specifically about your constituency, how will you vote?"
Well, it's possible that Labour aren't 25 points ahead. The history of opinion polling is basically a history of making adjustments to the data collected to correct for the fact that the sample isn't random. Hence, past-vote weighting, demographic weighting, weighting by newspaper readership, etc.
But, the more weightings you introduce, the larger your sample needs to be to ensure you have a large enough sample from each demographic, which is why MRP polls have such large samples, and should be considered more reliable than regular opinion polls. Certainly in terms of the quoted margin of error, which is a bit of a nonsense when a sample of one and a bit thousand has had several weightings applied to it.
There's also always risk that there's still a group of people missing from your sample. For example, it might be that people who are religiously observant, and attend church services, are more small-c conservative than the rest of the population, and so less likely to switch support, and they might also be less likely to respond to opinion polls, because they're more likely to be away from their computers. And so your sample of every demographic that you do weight for, might be skewed away from those who attend church/other religious building, and you might over-estimate the swing.
I could easily believe that current opinion polls have more respondents from people who spend more time online, and that people who spend more time online are more likely to support Reform, because they're spending time in the social media echo chambers that radicalise them into supporting Trump and believing that there's a variety of establishment conspiracies against them and theirs.
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Normalcy Bias is a profoundly powerful thing
People sat at their desks at the top of the twin towers on 9/11 even after they’d seen the plane crash and even when they had ample time to escape. They could not process the outrageous information
The oddest thing about Aaron’s resignation letter was the pop at the Environment Agency re: Walley’s Quarry.
Regulation is at the heart of the issue. You cannot moan about the failure of a regulator to deliver effective regulation when you and your party routinely denigrate regulation as evil red tape that ties honest businesses in knots. The Tory Government that Aaron supports has promoted a culture of ineffective regulation. The Environment Agency and other environmental regulators are not encouraged to do their jobs effectively.
This failure to recognise the appropriate balance between enterprise and regulation has consequences, such as the shit in rivers crisis. Which has cost them many votes.
And it’s one of the main reasons I will never vote Tory.
I'm still of the belief that the 'shit in the rivers crisis' is mostly invented. Yes, there's too much pollution being sent in, but is it really much more than before, given the way that reporting the incidents has changed?
(Not that I'm calling for progress on stopping this shit from happening.)
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Referencing the other post on the Sky News report , maybe you are missing the 'Conspiracy theorists' angle. In other words these ex-Con voters could never swing back due to what has happened.
The MRP is picking up some resilience for the SNP.
The tactical voting adjustment is fascinating - that's the Reform voters coming back in some places, but the Lib Dems winning the Blue Wall? I wonder how they modelled Scotland for the SNP to lose fewer seats.
It’s actually the flaw in the MRP approach, which assumes everything rests on demographics rather than local factors, which the tactical voting overlay is undoing by factoring in historical voting results. MRP assumes the same voting pattern for all 50-year old bus drivers and struggles with the reality that people do adapt their voting patterns to the political history and personalities and campaigning activity of their locality, in time.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Yes. But that doesn't mean you can necessarily discount the core (before tactical) MRP's results at a national level, if you assume that local effects balance out in aggregate.
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
For sure, but the MRP approach is effectively benefiting Labour, because with the exception of mortgage-free pensioners, every demographic is moving their way, and dumping these demographic shifts nationwide gives Labour a positive electoral swing everywhere - which to some, probably quite significant extent - it will get, such that there may well be seats where the LibDems are challenging but the Labour vote rises from third place. But this will be tempered by local voting history and active campaigning in a way that MRP struggles to model.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
There was a very thoughtful analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Trust into determinants of voting Brexit in the aftermath of the referendum.
One thing it found was how voters felt altered with their neighbours, so the well qualified were more Brexity in left behind Redwall towns, and the less qualified were more Remainery in Blue Wall shires. Each was affected by their milieu. So teachers in Winchester may well be more LibDemmy because they run into more Lib Dems as they go about their business.
I think this is the flaw in the MRP process. As well as individual determinants of voting, we are social creatures influenced by our neighbours.
This may well prevent the ELE of this MRP in those Tory bedrock seats. I would think that the Tories may well wind up with twice those 66 seats even if the polls don't shift. I think skewed to traditional heartlands rather than more recently acquired seats with big majorities, so Blue Wall rather than Red Wall.
At the peak of Reform's recent polling bubble, we saw Reform overtake the Tories in some demographic sub-samples, and so this effect may also act to make Reform's support more sticky than we might otherwise expect.
The other thing that makes Reform vote sticky is the Conspiracy Theory Counterculture, which includes some surprising elements of previous counterculture. This isn't MAGA land yet, but does explain why Reform voters are so pro-Trump. Our imagined communities that influence us are not just the people we see in the shop, but international on Social Media.
44 pieces of Russian artillery claimed hit yesterday. That is a big number - and might suggest that the Ukrainians are now using western weapons to hit them from firing positions inside Russia.
I had seen recent reports that new supplies from the US had reached the front line - in terms of HIMARS in particular - but I don't think there's much evidence of an uptick in reported Russian artillery losses recently. The 7-day average was 43 a week ago.
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Normalcy Bias is a profoundly powerful thing
People sat at their desks at the top of the twin towers on 9/11 even after they’d seen the plane crash and even when they had ample time to escape. They could not process the outrageous information
Normality Bias please. Defending the hill of the word "normality" is something I would happily die doing
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Referencing the other post on the Sky News report , maybe you are missing the 'Conspiracy theorists' angle. In other words these ex-Con voters could never swing back due to what has happened.
If the MRP is anywhere near correct and the Tories want to pick a more centrist candidate, a wild card might be Alicia Kearns, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee?
If the MRP is anywhere near correct the Tory membership won't be picking a centrist candidate after Sunak and Hunt lead them to landslide defeat. Though yes of the survivors Kearns and Tugenhadt would likely run from the centrist wing, Barclay from the middle of the party and Badenoch, Braverman and Patel from the right.
Under FPTP the latter likely would push for a pact or even merger with Reform
There are two very clear differences between Labour and the Conservatives. There is not nearly the same personal attachment to the Conservative Party as there is to the Labour Party. It doesn't matter how bonkers the Labour Party are, 30% of the electorate will vote for them. The same is not true of the Conservative Party.
This is a weird statement to make in light of electoral history. In the last four and a bit decades Labour have twice polled lower than 30% (1983 and 2010) while the lowest Tory poll share since 1832 was comfortably above 30% in 1997.
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Normalcy Bias is a profoundly powerful thing
People sat at their desks at the top of the twin towers on 9/11 even after they’d seen the plane crash and even when they had ample time to escape. They could not process the outrageous information
Normality Bias please. Defending the hill of the word "normality" is something I would happily die doing
It’s time to adjust to realcy
I am at the Soviet border! They write in Cyrillic! The guards are gruff and I have to lie about my job! They hate flint knappers, as we undermine the local limestone butt plug craftsmen
Is there anyone out there still thinks the top ranks of our civil service are any actual good? If they can come up with an idiot like this...
(On a different subject, that photo of Trump on the front page of the Times makes him look like Alec Douglas-Home only more skeletal. Perhaps we really are underestimating the health impacts of his constant crises.)
There are two very clear differences between Labour and the Conservatives. There is not nearly the same personal attachment to the Conservative Party as there is to the Labour Party. It doesn't matter how bonkers the Labour Party are, 30% of the electorate will vote for them. The same is not true of the Conservative Party.
This is a weird statement to make in light of electoral history. In the last four and a bit decades Labour have twice polled lower than 30% (1983 and 2010) while the lowest Tory poll share since 1832 was comfortably above 30% in 1997.
Okay, 28%. The Tories could go well below that this time.
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Normalcy Bias is a profoundly powerful thing
People sat at their desks at the top of the twin towers on 9/11 even after they’d seen the plane crash and even when they had ample time to escape. They could not process the outrageous information
Normality Bias please. Defending the hill of the word "normality" is something I would happily die doing
It’s time to adjust to realcy
I am at the Soviet border! They write in Cyrillic! The guards are gruff and I have to lie about my job! They hate flint knappers, as we undermine the local limestone butt plug craftsmen
It's clever of you to be at the Soviet border which ceased to exist some 32 years ago.
Anyone have a list of the 66 seats the Tories would hold? I wonder if Micky Fab's is one of them.
Aldridge-Brownhills Wendy Morton Arundel and South Downs Andrew Griffith Beaconsfield Joy Morrissey Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk John Lamont Bicester and Woodstock Unknown (new seat) Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe Fay Jones Brentwood and Ongar Alex Burghart Brigg and Immingham Martin Vickers Buckinghamshire Mid Greg Smith Cambridgeshire North East Steve Barclay Chichester Gillian Keegan Christchurch Christopher Chope Cotswolds North Unknown (new seat) Daventry Chris Heaton-Harris Devon South Anthony Mangnall Dorset North Simon Hoare Dorset West Chris Loder Droitwich and Evesham Nigel Huddleston East Grinstead and Uckfield Unknown (new seat) Essex North West Kemi Badenoch Exmouth and Exeter East Simon Jupp Fareham and Waterlooville Suella Braverman Gordon and Buchan Unknown (changed seat) Hamble Valley Unknown (new seat) Hampshire East Damian Hinds Hampshire North East Ranil Jayawardena Hampshire North West Kit Malthouse Herefordshire North Bill Wiggin Kenilworth and Southam Jeremy Wright Kingswinford and South Staffordshire Gavin Williamson Louth and Horncastle Victoria Atkins Maidenhead Theresa May Maldon John Whittingdale Melksham and Devizes Unknown (new seat) Meriden and Solihull East Saqib Bhatti Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr Craig Williams New Forest East Julian Lewis New Forest West Desmond Swayne Norfolk North Duncan Baker Old Bexley and Sidcup James Brokenshire Rayleigh and Wickford Mark Francois Reigate Crispin Blunt Richmond and Northallerton Rishi Sunak Romsey and Southampton North Caroline Nokes Runnymede and Weybridge Ben Spencer Rutland and Stamford Alicia Kearns Salisbury John Glen Sevenoaks Laura Trott Shropshire South Philip Dunne Solihull West and Shirley Julian Knight South Holland and The Deepings John Hayes Southend West and Leigh David Amess Stratford-on-Avon Nadhim Zahawi Surrey East Claire Coutinho Sussex Weald Nus Ghani Tewkesbury Laurence Robertson Tonbridge Tom Tugendhat Torbay Kevin Foster Waveney Valley Unknown (new seat) Weald of Kent Unknown (new seat) Wells and Mendip Hills James Heappey Wetherby and Easingwold Alec Shelbrooke Wiltshire East Danny Kruger Witham Priti Patel Witney Robert Courts Worcestershire West Harriett Baldwin
Micky Fab would lose to Labour by 2.0%
Thanks. Surprised that Solhull West would stay Tory, must be a split vote between Lab and LD. Also Southend West which a lot of other forecasts are saying would go Labour. Maybe they've taken the by-election as a base by mistake?
The more I think about it the more I question it. I'd be surprised if Caroline Nokes hangs on, for example, whilst I expect Penny Mordaunt to do so.
I also doubt Labour will clinch the IoW seats, although I could be wrong.
What joy that the 66 survivors will include Chope and Swayne. The flapping of white coats will continue.
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Even if the exit poll comes out with similar numbers many of us - me included - won't believe it.
I'm trying to remember my reaction to the SNP 58/59 in 2015. I probably didn't believe it then. They got 56 in the end.
There are two very clear differences between Labour and the Conservatives. There is not nearly the same personal attachment to the Conservative Party as there is to the Labour Party. It doesn't matter how bonkers the Labour Party are, 30% of the electorate will vote for them. The same is not true of the Conservative Party.
This is a weird statement to make in light of electoral history. In the last four and a bit decades Labour have twice polled lower than 30% (1983 and 2010) while the lowest Tory poll share since 1832 was comfortably above 30% in 1997.
I don’t believe it, anyway. Labour voters are easier to win over at local elections than Tories, although once you win over the Tories they are more loyal. Discontented Labour voters are relatively happy to vote Tory whereas many discontented Tory voters prefer to vote LibDem. The myth that Labour has this tribe of die hard supporters derives from the culture of trade unionism increasingly anachronistic in the modern world and, while such people do exist (you find many in local councils) that they represent 30% is for the birds.
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Normalcy Bias is a profoundly powerful thing
People sat at their desks at the top of the twin towers on 9/11 even after they’d seen the plane crash and even when they had ample time to escape. They could not process the outrageous information
Normality Bias please. Defending the hill of the word "normality" is something I would happily die doing
It’s time to adjust to realcy
I am at the Soviet border! They write in Cyrillic! The guards are gruff and I have to lie about my job! They hate flint knappers, as we undermine the local limestone butt plug craftsmen
It's clever of you to be at the Soviet border which ceased to exist some 32 years ago.
Does the Knappers' Gazette have a TARDIS?
If the Gazette is anything like the Spectator, half its readership wish they had a TARDIS so that they can go back in time and live in the past.
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Normalcy Bias is a profoundly powerful thing
People sat at their desks at the top of the twin towers on 9/11 even after they’d seen the plane crash and even when they had ample time to escape. They could not process the outrageous information
Normality Bias please. Defending the hill of the word "normality" is something I would happily die doing
It’s time to adjust to realcy
I am at the Soviet border! They write in Cyrillic! The guards are gruff and I have to lie about my job! They hate flint knappers, as we undermine the local limestone butt plug craftsmen
It's clever of you to be at the Soviet border which ceased to exist some 32 years ago.
The oddest thing about Aaron’s resignation letter was the pop at the Environment Agency re: Walley’s Quarry.
Regulation is at the heart of the issue. You cannot moan about the failure of a regulator to deliver effective regulation when you and your party routinely denigrate regulation as evil red tape that ties honest businesses in knots. The Tory Government that Aaron supports has promoted a culture of ineffective regulation. The Environment Agency and other environmental regulators are not encouraged to do their jobs effectively.
This failure to recognise the appropriate balance between enterprise and regulation has consequences, such as the shit in rivers crisis. Which has cost them many votes.
And it’s one of the main reasons I will never vote Tory.
I'm still of the belief that the 'shit in the rivers crisis' is mostly invented. Yes, there's too much pollution being sent in, but is it really much more than before, given the way that reporting the incidents has changed?
(Not that I'm calling for progress on stopping this shit from happening.)
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Even if the exit poll comes out with similar numbers many of us - me included - won't believe it.
I'm trying to remember my reaction to the SNP 58/59 in 2015. I probably didn't believe it then. They got 56 in the end.
So we can price in your disbelief by knocking 2% off?
The oddest thing about Aaron’s resignation letter was the pop at the Environment Agency re: Walley’s Quarry.
Regulation is at the heart of the issue. You cannot moan about the failure of a regulator to deliver effective regulation when you and your party routinely denigrate regulation as evil red tape that ties honest businesses in knots. The Tory Government that Aaron supports has promoted a culture of ineffective regulation. The Environment Agency and other environmental regulators are not encouraged to do their jobs effectively.
This failure to recognise the appropriate balance between enterprise and regulation has consequences, such as the shit in rivers crisis. Which has cost them many votes.
And it’s one of the main reasons I will never vote Tory.
I'm still of the belief that the 'shit in the rivers crisis' is mostly invented. Yes, there's too much pollution being sent in, but is it really much more than before, given the way that reporting the incidents has changed?
(Not that I'm calling for progress on stopping this shit from happening.)
The boring answer seems to be it's a failure of regulation. Water companies raise money from the public to pay for infrastructure that reduces the need to dump shit in the river. Totally eliminating the need in all situations is likely to be deemed unaffordable.
Water companies fundamentally make their profits by doing as little infrastructure development as possible for the money they raise and OFWAT allowed them to get away with it. At the same time OFWAT was reluctant to raise water rates further, which are unpopular with the public.
So poor bang for the buck and probably not enough buck anyway. It's a crazy business model.
The oddest thing about Aaron’s resignation letter was the pop at the Environment Agency re: Walley’s Quarry.
Regulation is at the heart of the issue. You cannot moan about the failure of a regulator to deliver effective regulation when you and your party routinely denigrate regulation as evil red tape that ties honest businesses in knots. The Tory Government that Aaron supports has promoted a culture of ineffective regulation. The Environment Agency and other environmental regulators are not encouraged to do their jobs effectively.
This failure to recognise the appropriate balance between enterprise and regulation has consequences, such as the shit in rivers crisis. Which has cost them many votes.
And it’s one of the main reasons I will never vote Tory.
I'm still of the belief that the 'shit in the rivers crisis' is mostly invented. Yes, there's too much pollution being sent in, but is it really much more than before, given the way that reporting the incidents has changed?
(Not that I'm calling for progress on stopping this shit from happening.)
That's not quite the same thing, as it ignores the last clause in my comment.
Sewage has routinely been released into water for years, especially during high-rainfall events. AIUI reporting of these was manually done - or at least, was *supposed* to be manually done. The accusation was that many releases wre not reported, or the amounts dramatically under-reported.
The argument is that the figures do not show a massive real increase in the amount released; just that the amount released is not being properly reported for the first time. The increase occurring whilst the program is being implemented in the mid-2010s may well point to this, and the fact decreases occur towards the end of the program.
There are two very clear differences between Labour and the Conservatives. There is not nearly the same personal attachment to the Conservative Party as there is to the Labour Party. It doesn't matter how bonkers the Labour Party are, 30% of the electorate will vote for them. The same is not true of the Conservative Party.
This is a weird statement to make in light of electoral history. In the last four and a bit decades Labour have twice polled lower than 30% (1983 and 2010) while the lowest Tory poll share since 1832 was comfortably above 30% in 1997.
I don’t believe it, anyway. Labour voters are easier to win over at local elections than Tories, although once you win over the Tories they are more loyal. Discontented Labour voters are relatively happy to vote Tory whereas many discontented Tory voters prefer to vote LibDem. The myth that Labour has this tribe of die hard supporters derives from the culture of trade unionism increasingly anachronistic in the modern world and, while such people do exist (you find many in local councils) that they represent 30% is for the birds.
Indeed, over the last 40 years the Tories have been much more of a ‘movement’ party than Labour. The reason that’s finally breaking down is that the generation that formed that movement is dying out.
It's clear who the real Nazis are, whatever some on here say...
I must have missed the regular Putin supporters on this site. Save for our regular bots. Who TF are you talking about??? No one (with the above exceptions) on here is calling the Ukrainians Nazis.
I didn't say Putin supporters. But for people excusing Russia's actions - as usual I'd point to @NickPalmer and @Dura_Ace . Nick in particular said some very odd things in the run-up, and during the early days, of the SMO.
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Even if the exit poll comes out with similar numbers many of us - me included - won't believe it.
I'm trying to remember my reaction to the SNP 58/59 in 2015. I probably didn't believe it then. They got 56 in the end.
I always believe Sir John Curtice.
He knows precisely what he's doing, and his exit polls are as accurate as they can be.
If the MRP is anywhere near correct and the Tories want to pick a more centrist candidate, a wild card might be Alicia Kearns, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee?
If the MRP is anywhere near correct the Tory membership won't be picking a centrist candidate after Sunak and Hunt lead them to landslide defeat. Though yes of the survivors Kearns and Tugenhadt would likely run from the centrist wing, Barclay from the middle of the party and Badenoch, Braverman and Patel from the right.
Under FPTP the latter likely would push for a pact or even merger with Reform
Good morning
The same Reform whose President, Farage, and Leader, Tice, are fawning over Trump
Tice said yesterday' Reform will appeal to the ECHR over vat on private school fees and at the same time wants to leave it
He also bought 1066 into the immigration debate to wide scale mirth
Of course Braverman and a few other right wing conservatives should already be in that party but I will not be a part of it and remain hopeful enough one nation conservatives remain to take the partly back to the centre and a chance of governing sometime in the future
You have a desire for a party I do not want anything to do with
It's odd, I see these MRP results and I simply don't believe the result will be anything like this. But I can't really say why. And what if that's because it's just unlike results we've seen before? What if this time really is different? I forecast for a living, and the hardest thing to know is when the paradigm has genuinely shifted, when your data are being drawn from a different distribution from before. In this case it's complicated by emotional involvement, too. So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
Normalcy Bias is a profoundly powerful thing
People sat at their desks at the top of the twin towers on 9/11 even after they’d seen the plane crash and even when they had ample time to escape. They could not process the outrageous information
Normality Bias please. Defending the hill of the word "normality" is something I would happily die doing
It’s time to adjust to realcy
I am at the Soviet border! They write in Cyrillic! The guards are gruff and I have to lie about my job! They hate flint knappers, as we undermine the local limestone butt plug craftsmen
It's clever of you to be at the Soviet border which ceased to exist some 32 years ago.
Does the Knappers' Gazette have a TARDIS?
It’s brilliant. They still drive knackered old Ladas
Comments
Most people are bored of the election campaign. I know I am and have l little appetite for following it or even the leaders’ debates.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t interest in the vote and result. People are seething with the Conservatives and have been for two or three years. We feel that they are thoroughly nasty, have screwed public services, and messed up people’s mortgages and cost of living etc. etc.
It’s just that minds were made up ages back, whatever the MSM tries to claim otherwise.
I also doubt Labour will clinch the IoW seats, although I could be wrong.
So maybe it's actually 65 seats.
Good. Glad it's sunk in. Reflecting on it will do you some good.
I first said on here over 2 years ago that there would be a Labour landslide, to much derision at the time. I partly based this somewhat anecdotally on listening to friends and people out and about on buses, trains, and in shops.
CR may attack the electorate for wanting revenge but we have a lot to be angry about. I can just remember 1997 and it wasn’t like this. The level of anger with the governing party this time is something else.
The York and North Yorkshire mayoral election made a few people sit up.
It might be worth a flutter at 4/1 on Labour.
The entire party can travel round in the “We spend £350m a week…” battle bus and continue to live their delusions
We told him we weren’t going to intervene in the world’s trouble spots.
So the Conservatives are not blameless on that.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61555821
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmfaff/169/report.html
(Some try to deny this but unsuccessfully imho and usually to try and absolve Biden)
I think the only way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him. Yes you need courage to do that.
I’ve clearly got right under your skin which is why you resort to personal abuse - to me and many others on here.
You really aren’t doing a lot to disabuse us of the notion that your party is full of very nasty people.
We should have lobbied Biden and at the very least slowed him down and put in place something more orderly, with a more clearly defined transition period.
If we hadn’t burned our bridges we might also have elicited support from other allies.
So it’s not that tactical voting ‘helps’ or ‘hurts’ particular parties, as the simplistic media portrayal of this poll is suggesting, but that the MRP methodology alone is unable to explain the complexity and variability of voting patterns across the country, and so the model has to ‘cheat’ by factoring in actual election results somehow.
YouGov attempts to deal with this by using its mega-panel as a base and somehow melding this with the national demographics. But even Yougov only has fifty or so people in each seat, which means there’s a lot of statistical risk with giving the local panel too much weight (which we saw last time around with the YG projections for east Devon, suggesting the Indy would win).
Indeed, with so many long-standing Conservative MPs standing down (and a struggle to find new candidates), those local effects might even be weighted against the Tories. Some of their candidates are campaigning from Greece, would you believe.
Sorry.
You could do worse than have a couple of quid on each of them to be next Conservative leader.
Well, maybe give Chope a swerve, but you get the idea.
Simplistically, there isn’t really a demographic explanation as to why there are more LibDem voting middle aged female headteachers in Winchester than in Sevenoaks.
You're suggesting that the Labour vote in the 66 Tory holds might be a bit higher than projected, and the Tory vote in the 476 Labour seats the same? Therefore, given the imbalance in the projected number of seats between the parties, this can only be a good thing for the Conservatives overall.
(I see that you've provided another example above. Interesting!)
I was at Kempton. The weather had been hot and dry for a long time and the ground was like tinder. We were waiting for the main event which was a six runner long-distance hurdle. There were three well-matched high class horses heading the market at 15/8. The other three were donkeys, hoping to pick up some place money. They were trading at 50/1, 100/1, and 200/1 respectively. Twenty minutes before the off a summer storm broke and flooded the track. Suddenly the going was not only different, but unlike any the horses would have ever encountered. (Going is the most important factor in any horse race.) I knew it was the moment to back an outsider, but couldn't bring myself to back a donkey at three figure odds, so I bet on the 50/1 shot. The 200/1 chance came in. (It never won another race.)
May I suggest that what you have here is the political equivalent of that Kempton race, in the most exceptional of circumstances.
(To hit every PB cliche).
We can see this is flawed because each of us as an individual has both personal/historical and social/economic reasons for our vote, and the former are random. The pollsters just hope they will average out. But of course, they don’t. And this isn’t just an individual thing - social groups or localities or even whole age cohorts who live through a transformative political time or event will carry the after-effect of this through their future voting life in a way that those with similar demographics coming along behind won’t share.
Remember that the most fundamental peculiarity of British voting patterns is the tendency towards UNS or ‘straight swing’; people guess as to why this is, but it’s never been explained let alone such an explanation tested. Kellner’s attempt last year was almost risible. Ironically this year’s GE will probably see the least uniform, most proportional swing of the century’s GEs.
Another way to look at it is to consider the scenario of a single person - any of us - who had the motivation, skills and resources to devote to it, could move into a seat and devote their entire life and time to campaigning there, for whatever political persuasion, and over time you’d see an impact in the electoral results for that locality, which no amount of data and no amount of sophisticated modelling could ever account for.
This could mean backing for or against any Party. For example, in the constituency markets try to back candidates who might stand out against the swing. I'm thinking about people like Oliver Dowden and Tom Tugenhat, well-respected local MPs who have a different sort of message. I haven't checked the odds, and in any case it's a bit early to be betting individual constituencies, and of course, DYOR as always.
You can probably think of better examples, but if i have helped steer anyone the right way, I'm happy.
(And if I have steered them the wrong way, I have a very good lawyer.)
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/money/pensions-and-retirement/labour-nhs-backlog-plan-staff-exodus-pension-3080436
Labour has been warned of an NHS staff “exodus” this summer unless it urgently sets out how its plans to reinstate tax on large pension pots will work.
The party has committed to reintroducing the lifetime allowance cap on pensions – a limit on the amount people can build in pension savings over their lifetime and still receive tax relief – having criticised the Government for removing it.
Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves pledged to reinstate the limit, but said the party would allow a work-around for NHS workers to avoid senior doctors leaving the workforce. A party spokesperson also told i earlier this year that its solution would “cover other public sector leaders”.
One rule for them...
One thing it found was how voters felt altered with their neighbours, so the well qualified were more Brexity in left behind Redwall towns, and the less qualified were more Remainery in Blue Wall shires. Each was affected by their milieu. So teachers in Winchester may well be more LibDemmy because they run into more Lib Dems as they go about their business.
I think this is the flaw in the MRP process. As well as individual determinants of voting, we are social creatures influenced by our neighbours.
This may well prevent the ELE of this MRP in those Tory bedrock seats. I would think that the Tories may well wind up with twice those 66 seats even if the polls don't shift. I think skewed to traditional heartlands rather than more recently acquired seats with big majorities, so Blue Wall rather than Red Wall.
https://x.com/DanNeidle/status/1796455532771127650
Dan Neidle
@DanNeidle
This is all an uncomfortable result from my personal political perspective: I'm in favour of increased spending on public services, and that can only come from taxation.
But right now, that is a distinctly minority position.
I think it's a consequence of New Labour. They increased public spending without increasing taxation all that much. And people think that that ought to be the norm.
But it's possible that current or future changes in support are on an axis not in the model - such as youtube viewership hours - but I guess that only matters if such an axis is concentrated geographically, or is over/under-represented in the base sample.
What I have heard colleagues get nervous about is taxation of lump sums, which have current limits of 25% of the pot or £238 000, whichever is lower.
The rules change that came in last October on partial retirement make it a lot easier for senior clinicians to take their pension, but to continue part time (up to 90% WTE). This is part of scheme rules rather than tax policy.
It might not necessarily be quite so accurate this time if demographics aren't the primary predictor.
That’s hard enough with military only, but add in a nervous civilian population, a plane full of dogs and the full glare of modern media it actually went off extraordinarily well.
It could have been so much worse…
I first came across this hypothesis over forty years ago, and struggle with it particularly in a modern context. Seats are fairly small, and with modern mobility and working patterns, how realistic is it to think that our pattern of social contact is determined by our constituency, especially in an urban context where you’re talking slices of a city? In the workplace, our colleagues will be from whole swathes of seats. And didn’t Brexit show that we all mix in our bubbles of the like-minded, anyway? Especially with social media and the rest.
That someone as experienced and respected as Kellner could only try to explain UNS - which in essence is the tendency for similar absolute numbers of voters to change in each seat - by suggesting that there is a certain type of person called a ‘floating voter’, whom (for some unexplained reason) are distributed evenly across the country (when almost every other type of voter is not!) was clearly the ultimate circular argument, and an intellectual fail.
One thing to look out for is a swing from Labour to the Lib Dems. It happened in 1997 and I'd expect it to happen this time. I'm not sure if there have been any polls like this yet, but I'd also like to see some polling that asks "thinking specifically about your constituency, how will you vote?"
The private sector creates wealth. Too much government destroys it.
Otherwise North Korea would be prosperous and South Korea a basket case.
Same with Northern Ireland, where 75% of GDP is government, and London, where about 30% is.
And guess which direction Labour want to send the country in?
So I continue to say no, the result will not look like this. But if it is, we can't say we weren't warned.
However, there's a natural counterweight to that: if the Labour lead is absolutely vast then they become a credible challenger virtually everywhere and that, in turn, will keep the LD vote suppressed as left-wing voters revert to their primary preferred choice.
Some things to consider re this MRP.
Fieldwork was 20 May to 27 May, so 3/7ths before the election was called.
Results were 46/19 so high end Lab, low end Tory, ameliorated by them blending recent poll average at 45/23. Lets say its assuming a 24 point lead overall.
DKs have been reallocated on the same basis as the way 2019 voters say they will vote now who select a party, proportionately.
All considered, i'd treat this (negative Tory movement from here notwithstanding) as worst possible case scenario.
https://www.jrf.org.uk/political-mindsets/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-of-opportunities
So demographics matter, but so does the immediate environment. No man is an island, we are all part of the main.
And the west's appeasement (yes, that word again...) of Russia goes back much further than the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Georgia in 2008 was a warning sign that was ignored, as was Litvinenko and others. Russia did something bad, and 'we' just clucked and, at best, threw a few small sanctions their way.
Putin is a fascist and an imperialist. History has shown us how such people behave, and yet many choose to ignore it.
I'd treat it as a 'best' case scenario but otherwise all good points.
The terrain and political culture there means that you can over ever have a tentative suzerainty over largely independent tribal groupings.
It’s just not feasible to control the country with military force.
This report from Sky News was quite fascinating:
https://news.sky.com/story/katie-hopkins-looked-at-me-during-a-weekend-truth-festival-and-said-i-smell-a-virgin-13145544
These are not easy voters for the Tories to squeeze.
And i can confirm its a different bed, i am quite alone!!
Regulation is at the heart of the issue. You cannot moan about the failure of a regulator to deliver effective regulation when you and your party routinely denigrate regulation as evil red tape that ties honest businesses in knots. The Tory Government that Aaron supports has promoted a culture of ineffective regulation. The Environment Agency and other environmental regulators are not encouraged to do their jobs effectively.
This failure to recognise the appropriate balance between enterprise and regulation has consequences, such as the shit in rivers crisis. Which has cost them many votes.
And it’s one of the main reasons I will never vote Tory.
"The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation has declared the Movement of Spouses of Mobilized Russian Soldiers a "Way Home" - a Foreign Agent
Authorities have assigned the status of a "foreign agent" to the "Way Home" movement, whose activists are demanding the return of mobilized from the battlefield and an end to the war with Ukraine. The Ministry of Justice said that the organization had been spreading "inaccurate information aimed at creating a negative image" about Russia and its armed forces, as well as materials from "foreign agents"."
https://x.com/20gimsack/status/1796760803699236925
(Not that I'm calling for progress on stopping this shit from happening.)
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/30/europe/russia-sexual-violence-occupied-ukraine-intl-cmd/index.html
It's clear who the real Nazis are, whatever some on here say...
Secondly, the Labour vote is concentrated in urban areas. In 1997, the Conservatives (with 31.5% of the GB vote) won over 50% of the vote in 13 seats. In 2010, Labour (with 29.7% of the GB vote) won over 50% of the vote in 49 seats in England alone.
However, it is also worth remembering that tactical voting doesn't work so well when there is a large swing to Labour:
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2022/01/23/analysing-labour-lib-dem-tactical-voting-since-1983/
Simply, voters won't realise that their seat is now a marginal and, even if they do, working out how to vote is quite tricky as the Labour vote rises. Add into the mix that the Lib Dems were second last time in quite a few seats that are perhaps better bets for Labour, and the picture is made even less clear.
The really big unknown is Reform. Ukip were overstated in 2017. I think Reform will be too this time, but I'm not all that confident.
Will people see these seat predictions and decide to vote Tory to temper the size of the majority? I'm far from certain. One thing I would note is that after 1997, the Tories were in quite a vulnerable position. Had the electorate been minded to, the Tories could easily have been replaced by the Lib Dems as the opposition. But that didn't happen. Maybe enough voters will want to ensure a centre-right party is the opposition to keep Labour in check.
But, the more weightings you introduce, the larger your sample needs to be to ensure you have a large enough sample from each demographic, which is why MRP polls have such large samples, and should be considered more reliable than regular opinion polls. Certainly in terms of the quoted margin of error, which is a bit of a nonsense when a sample of one and a bit thousand has had several weightings applied to it.
There's also always risk that there's still a group of people missing from your sample. For example, it might be that people who are religiously observant, and attend church services, are more small-c conservative than the rest of the population, and so less likely to switch support, and they might also be less likely to respond to opinion polls, because they're more likely to be away from their computers. And so your sample of every demographic that you do weight for, might be skewed away from those who attend church/other religious building, and you might over-estimate the swing.
I could easily believe that current opinion polls have more respondents from people who spend more time online, and that people who spend more time online are more likely to support Reform, because they're spending time in the social media echo chambers that radicalise them into supporting Trump and believing that there's a variety of establishment conspiracies against them and theirs.
People sat at their desks at the top of the twin towers on 9/11 even after they’d seen the plane crash and even when they had ample time to escape. They could not process the outrageous information
Under FPTP the latter likely would push for a pact or even merger with Reform
I am at the Soviet border! They write in Cyrillic! The guards are gruff and I have to lie about my job! They hate flint knappers, as we undermine the local limestone butt plug craftsmen
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crggz77zp7zo
Is there anyone out there still thinks the top ranks of our civil service are any actual good? If they can come up with an idiot like this...
(On a different subject, that photo of Trump on the front page of the Times makes him look like Alec Douglas-Home only more skeletal. Perhaps we really are underestimating the health impacts of his constant crises.)
Does the Knappers' Gazette have a TARDIS?
I'm trying to remember my reaction to the SNP 58/59 in 2015. I probably didn't believe it then. They got 56 in the end.
The other half think that they do.
Water companies fundamentally make their profits by doing as little infrastructure development as possible for the money they raise and OFWAT allowed them to get away with it. At the same time OFWAT was reluctant to raise water rates further, which are unpopular with the public.
So poor bang for the buck and probably not enough buck anyway. It's a crazy business model.
Sewage has routinely been released into water for years, especially during high-rainfall events. AIUI reporting of these was manually done - or at least, was *supposed* to be manually done. The accusation was that many releases wre not reported, or the amounts dramatically under-reported.
A program started to allow automated monitoring of such releases, which means that the figures are properly reported.
https://environmentagency.blog.gov.uk/2021/03/31/event-duration-monitoring-lifting-the-lid-on-storm-overflows/
The argument is that the figures do not show a massive real increase in the amount released; just that the amount released is not being properly reported for the first time. The increase occurring whilst the program is being implemented in the mid-2010s may well point to this, and the fact decreases occur towards the end of the program.
But yes, we need to dump less shit in the water.
He knows precisely what he's doing, and his exit polls are as accurate as they can be.
The same Reform whose President, Farage, and Leader, Tice, are fawning over Trump
Tice said yesterday' Reform will appeal to the ECHR over vat on private school fees and at the same time wants to leave it
He also bought 1066 into the immigration debate to wide scale mirth
Of course Braverman and a few other right wing conservatives should already be in that party but I will not be a part of it and remain hopeful enough one nation conservatives remain to take the partly back to the centre and a chance of governing sometime in the future
You have a desire for a party I do not want anything to do with