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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The leading academic forecasters gather for the biggest event before May 7th
It’s an early start for me this morning to get to Westminster for what looks set to be the most important gathering of academic forecasters before the big day.
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Looks pretty fixed to me.
My gut feeling tells me that YouGov's panel is bust. ICM seems to far towards the Tories, so I suspect that it's on the upper end, but the ComRes poll in the SW (admittedly small and constituency so I am naturally sceptical) is supportive evidence.
Either the online or the phone polls are going to be horribly wrong. I'd back ICM over YouGov.
My personal view is that we have a small tory lead of around 0.5% - 1% and that will be reflected on the day, what we don't have is momentum. In 21 days time it'll be over, I don't see any game changers. The collapse of the labour vote in Scotland is hiding it's strength in England. Whatever comes out of Scotland will be anti tory so it can be discounted.
In order to get a situation where Con + LD > Lab + SNP, I think we need a tory lead of ~5%. I can't see that happening at present, therefore Ed is PM.
We have no ideas how many marginal will change hands because of a leak of 2-3000 votes to either or both of the greens or the kippers. Not enough to give either them a first three place in the local vote, but enough to change the winner. There are 50 or so seats with less than 2000 majority.
We are mostly speculating where the LD collapse vote will go, it might split to Labour and the Conservatives, or it might stay at home. Ditto the receding kipper vote. We assume a SNP riot in Scotland, but it doesn't take very many points of shift to LAB at the last minute to make it a much more modest affair given the huge majorities that need to be overturned.
We have no real idea how differential turnout, especially on the back of individual voter registration is going to effect the result, it might well show a marked dip in younger voters, and hence reduce the left leaning turnout considerably.
We talk endlessly about needing an 11%+ swing for a Tory majority, but that is UNS, and UNS is looking increasingly unreliable in a multi party election. If Labour pours on votes in the inner cities and bleeds votes to the kippers in the suburbs it might need a lot less, if the Tories pile on votes in the shires and loose seats to Labour in the Midlands they might need more.
Even if I wasn't out the of country until several months after the election, my money would be staying in my pocket for this election with the exception of Scotland.
50 hours 50 minutes 50 seconds
Clearly I wish these pale imitatiions well as they fumble around in the dark and then strangely begin to ease grudgingly around my ARSE.
Apart from being very noble Mrs JackW was getting a little tired of offloading OGH's competition prizes of various cases of hair tonics and restoratives down to local church bazaars.
Mind you the pews around North Hertfordshire are now full of some interesting elderly men with "winning here" hair styles.
http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2015/04/south-ribble/
If that were to show a Tory lead of, say, 5% then the view that the Yougov panel model is broken would gain a lot of strength. If it were to show something similar to Yougov then conversely the ICM would really look like a fairly extreme outlier.
At the moment in the competition I have gone for a modest Labour plurality largely based on the majority of polling. I may well change my mind and get somewhat closer to Jack's ARSE if Ipsos Mori showed a significant Tory lead.
That sounds great, but he might have a slight problem... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/11540433/David-Cameron-SNP-will-be-chain-to-Labours-wrecking-ball-if-Ed-Miliband-wins.html
Twa cheeks...
Given around 25 losses to the SNP, Labour on 300 seats implies approx. 60+ gains from the Tories .... Hhhmmm.
http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/9350
Phone polls seem to favour the Conservatives. However this could be an effect of internet polls seeming to favour UKIP/Greens.
That sounds great, but he might have a slight problem... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/11540433/David-Cameron-SNP-will-be-chain-to-Labours-wrecking-ball-if-Ed-Miliband-wins.html
Twa cheeks...
Isn't Nicola Sturgeon already backing down wanting Barnett formula rather than financial independence?
@Claire_Phipps: Labour gives @BuzzFeedUK first look at its latest anti-Cameron ad http://t.co/oV3IoWnkSA #ELECTION2015
Besides it has potency.
The divergence between phone and internet polls is interesting if only because at some point in the future phone polls will be choosing from a diminishing pool of responders.
This could be mitigated by increasing the percentage of calls to "mobiles", but is unlikely to be fully effective.
(people on mobiles will not generally respond to polls unless they are in their homes at the time)
Maybe i'm missing something - but as I understand it, the internet pollsters have a big panel of, say, 100,000 people - and, each time a poll is commissioned, *invite* ~1000 people to fit a demographic profile.
Surely it would make more sense to only poll specific individuals in marginal constituencies (who are on the electoral roll) and then repoll exactly the same people to see if they change their mind. Repoll these people immediately after they've voted - rinse & repeat every month for the next 5 years.
Then, instead of weighting the responses, converting to vote shares and baxtering - we would just get direct seat projections.
I guess my question boils down to - why use random sampling when measuring changes in opinion over time, when individual opinion changes can be captured cheaply, accurately and regularly - and are probably more useful in determining the end result (which seats actually change hands)?
@Douglas4Paisley: Watching this, you can see why David Cameron is too scared to debate tonight. https://t.co/n6Opwwv2L6
Are you sure UKIP's voters are mainly elderly, as opposed to say middle aged?
Not sure why that is not consistent with this 'video'.
There must be some better method which we just haven't thought of yet though. Use Facebook or Twitter in some way, or back to approaching people in the street?
Unless you are value trading in the market then betting on Labour and Ed Miliband at that seat level shows a level of faith that hasn't been seen since "Stuart Truth" was prognosticating on PB over two years back.
That ended well.
Umm, not very, Bob...
@afneil: IMF says tax revenues will be 36.1% GDP by 2020 instead of OBR's 36.3%. Be sceptical of such decimal-point forecasts so far into distance.
Possibly combining the two? The point about mobile users being more reluctant to respond to polls while on the move is down to how the users tend to perceive calls to them in different situations.
He knows my ARSE from the YouGov ELBOW.
The net pollsters had 'gap' inaccuracies going up to 5.5%
Which neatly summed it up!
I'm no psephologist - obviously - but it does strike me that dismissing internet polls is a bit silly. With all the extra data that can be captured with technology, surely it's only a matter of time before the methodology of internet polls becomes more accurate in achieving the ultimate objective (the constituency tallies) than the old tried & trusted methods. We might not be there yet, I'll grant you
OGH is clearly devastated that a Tory poster has appeared in his area of Bedford for the 1st time.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/laurence-stellings/ukip-poll-voters_b_6631026.html
In fact, the big UKIP demographics are the ones generally that are unlikely to have everyday internet access. So, I am not sure why phone pollsters would find more elderly Tory voters, but fewer elderly UKIP ones.
Does that amount to an admission that Labour did at some stage actually have such plans?
I couldn't possibly comment.
If EIC is looking like a winner one imagines the non-doms will be contacting their estate agents.
They have definitely got the balance much better in this election than they did in 2010. Unfortunately it was in 2010 that a majority was there for the taking.
If we had a well-behaved, spam-free internet you'd just email people. We don't, and the only way round that is an opt-in. People self-select by opting in, and then again by not dropping out when they realise what a ballsachingly tedious exercise in futility answering an online poll actually is. (It is very much more than a simple "How you gonna vote?") This may not matter because you get equal proportions of oddballs on each side, but that isn't obvious. There is also the following purely theoretical danger: if one major party said to each new activist recruit, by word of mouth, that they were expected to sign up to internet polling panels, and the other party didn't, that would distort the results. There is no evidence AT ALL of this happening but on the other hand I can see no way of effectively guarding against it.
It's sort of like electing the Pope: just as wanting to be Pope is a very undesirable quality in a potential Pope, you don't want to poll people who are positively eager to be polled.
114.4 (pre-method change) implied vote= 33.98% (last six samples)
120.2 (post-method change) implied vote= 35.69%
Conservative 2015:2010 vote ratio - Yougov
94.5 (pre-method change) implied vote = 34.93% (last six samples)
89.6 (post-method change) implied vote = 33.09%
If you look at the last 2 weeks of YouGov polls, the Tories have been 33-37 and Labour 33-36 and almost all the leads either way have been caused by +1 or -1 for one side or the other. The LibDems, UKIP and Greens have barely shifted, again maybe +1 or -1.
On Monday voter registration closes. I hope Andy JS does one of his excellent spreadsheets on the size of constituency electorates and the difference from 2010. It will be interesting to see if in marginal seats, particularly those with large transient communities like students, there has been a substantial fall in registrations.
I remain convinced we will see the final votes at something like Tory 35-37, Labour 29-31, LibDem 12-15 and UKIP 10-12. In Scotland I expect the SNP to possibly pick up 25-30 Labour seats. If they pick up more then Ed is looking like ending up with fewer MPs than Gordon Brown did in 2010.
Anecdote alert: My eldest cousin lives in Jim Murphy's seat. We were discussing how it looks for him last night. She said she and her neighbours like Murphy but wouldn't dream of voting for him. Her view is they wouldn't be surprised of Dr David Monty scrapes through the middle of a dogfight between Murphy and the SNP. I wouldn't go that far but would be thrilled if it comes to pass.
Mr. Mark, I saw Peston last night (on the TV, I hasten to add). I kept waiting for him to point out the IMF had criticised Osborne's plans, only to end up praising the UK economy as the model to follow.
Only it seemed to have slipped his mind.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32325884
"The suggestion that you can laugh at everything, except certain aspects of Islam, because Muslims are much more prickly that the rest of the population - what is that, if not discrimination?"
Generally, the Labour online and telephone poll scores are pretty much the same. The big variances seem to be the UKIP and Tory scores. That's one of the reasons I see a big Tory seat lead. When push comes to shove a lot of UKIP-inclined voters are going to go for the Tories. It could be that ICM has found them further down the line to making that final decision. On a really bad night for Labour, there could also be Tory tactical voting for UKIP and the LDs, which would see Labour come in much lower than 250 seats - especially if it is an almost total wipe-out in Scotland.
Pointing out the record of a party in govt isn't negative personal campaigning
If the conservatives made an advert highlighting Miliband announcing. Leftist policies that wouldn't be an attack ad, when they tweet pics of him pulling funny faces etc that is
Do you understand the difference?
But on a more general note, understanding how the dynamics of public opinion, voting actions and election results all fit together is simply something that's useful to know. To what extent does swingback occur, and why? How potent is media endorsement? What effect does a good or bad performance in a debate have? Do marginal behave differently from safe seats, and if so, how? What of seats where minor parties are in contention? How do you model Scotland? These are all legitimate academic questions which have a relevance that goes beyond predicting the results for May 7 to what the nature of political campaigning is - and to wider political questions still, about power itself.
That is negative personal campaigning
Do you understand the difference?
They are saying he is scared of defending his record in govt... That is a fair comment.
If Cameron was scared of heights and the tag line was 'David Cameron is scared of heights' that would be irrelevant and unfair and you would them have a point if you pointed it out
Do we know who their ad agency is?