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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The signs that were there before the exit poll that a CON land
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The signs that were there before the exit poll that a CON landslide wasn’t on the cards
On Wednesday, alongside Keiran Pedley and other leading pollsters, I took part in a post GE2017 conference organised by the University of Loughborough at its London campus in the Olympic park. It was a good event and I’m looking forward to some of the serious studies, including the post-election BES analysis that will be published.
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There is a single fly in this ointment, and that is that Liam Fox is the only dissenter in the cabinet. May, Hammond and the rest are broadly in agreement on the need for a 3-4 year adjustment period. (This covers a wide variety of views, of course. Some will accept limited ECJ rulings and FoM in this period, others insist we must be free sooner.) The exception is Liam Fox who has argued for a transition period "of two to four months".
Now call my cynical, but I don't believe Dr Fox genuinely believes a three month transition is optimal. But he believes the only way to get his hands on the Crown is to be the "arch Leaver", with everyone else a traitor to the vote...
Fox has already begun to knuckle under - two years "not out of the question":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-40667030
On polls I thought Nate Silver's analysis was academically pretty poor. Analysing the random error of historical polling misses the key point that the 2017 polls were heavily adulterated by sdjustments precisely to try and 'compensate' for past polling mistakes. We weren't looking at random error, but at a systemic bias introduced to deal with factors that the pollsters assumed were generic but that actually turned out to be specific to past elections, but not the current one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-lawyers-seek-to-undercut-muellers-russia-investigation/2017/07/20/232ebf2c-6d71-11e7-b9e2-2056e768a7e5_story.html
Assuming this story is true (& no doubt Trump will now deny it, as he does everything) it at least suggests the possibility that Mueller's follow the money strategy might bear fruit.
I have opened a very small position on a Trump exit in 2017, and a slightly larger one for 2018. Nothing major, but this bears watching.
But the key issue is differential turnout. The story of polling in recent years is always fighting the last war. Because young, urban voters didn't bother in previous elections, they were largely discounted by pollsters and veteran politicians alike. The willingness of Corbyn, McDonnell and Momentum to ignore precedent and say "hell, let's have a go at getting them out anyway" turned out to be a trump card.
Will that recur? To some extent, almost certainly. As much? More? Who knows. So the way forward is perhaps for pollsters to give the basic figures WITHOUT turnout guess-tweaks (i.e. just based on stated certainty to vote) more prominence - before the last election you often had to dig to even find them, and only the perennially optimstic Justin really bothered - and then add "this is what the figures would be if we tweaked like this". That would enable people to make up their own minds and would protect pollsters against looking horribly wrong.
There was a volatility about the electorate this time that made the result hard to predict. And plenty of voters did change their allegiances both ways, as shown by some of the unexpected constituency results, just in different proportions from those expected before the election.
There's a lot more work still to be done.
An express train running between two major Swedish cities will be named Trainy McTrainface, after the railway company opened up the name to a public vote.
MTR Express, with Swedish newspaper Metro, opened up a poll to name four new trains running between the capital Stockholm and Gothenburg on the country's west coast.
Trainy McTrainface, which received 49 per cent of the vote, was the most popular name.
Two other trains will be called Estelle — named after the 5-year-old princess of Sweden, and Glenn — a popular name in Gothenburg. The fourth will be named by a staff member, the company said.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-20/swedish-train-to-be-named-trainy-mctrainface/8729284
Mr. M, I hope there are other joke names that win votes and people don't stick to a formula.
In Skyrim, you get lots of letters from Jarls etc which uses your name, and can intercept stuff from the Dark Brotherhood if they send assassins after you. Not that I've ever done this, but you could name a character "My good-for-nothing son" or "My cheap date daughter", and then assassin note would read "Somebody wants my good-for-nothing son dead".
You could do the same with the train name as it's going to be publicly announced. "I'm desperately alone" or "Celine Dion, I love you" etc etc could work.
Not that I spend much time thinking about this sort of thing. ....
It's easy to look at this voting pattern and over-analyse things, concluding this must be a strong anti-EU person who left the LibDems for UKIP and then Labour over Brexit, when the truth is simply that they are simply trying to throw what looks like the best spanner at the establishment each time.
But actually kicking a President out is really hard, and would require a decent number of republicans to vote against their own party...
That said - things are certainly moving faster than I thought they would.
The risk that Trump just quits though is reduced if he thinks he can pardon himself/his family as President...
I think Lusser's Law is very applicable to polling. The more changes you make to the raw figures, the more likely you are to make a big mistake in your assumptions that invalidate the results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusser's_law
And if it means Liam Fox gets sidelined, so much the better. Perhaps he has realised he has massively overpromised on trade deals and so is hoping to get fired/storm out in a blaze of glory?
The fly in the ointment is how this transition period will fit with a general election/political timescales. Will the gang hoping to succeed May sign up to it? Will there be a Tory leadership contest before the next election and before the transition ends? Presumably Labour will support this transition deal, whilst maybe quibbling about certain elements...
This time the raw data did seem better, but has anyone done a systematic analysis?
Yes you're right!
http://brexitcentral.com/brexit-on-track-barnier-seeds-compromise/
One game I play will report in a massively multiplayer online situation that "XXX has just shot you" with XXX being their username. I occasionally play as "Someone" which makes the message more annoying to the other player than is really necessary for harmonious gameplay.
Brexit is a complex change programme. New regulatory agencies need to be established and new customs regimes and infrastructure put in place.
That will require new infrastructure, recruitment, resourcing, planning and delivery to tight timescales, and then to be tested, communicated before a "go live".
All of that takes time. And 3-4 years isn't much, particularly in the public sector where the record of delivering such projects is mixed.
https://twitter.com/johnrentoul/status/887946221570195456
The YouGov model suggests that the Tories were in trouble from their manifesto launch onwards, and the Survation guy was confidently predicting a hung parliament in the week before the election. Yet I know myself Labour canvassers who had a difficult time of it during the election and on polling day expected seats to be marginal that in the event were won by miles, to their surprise.
Canvassing is talking to older people.
By the way, I recall a pre-election discussion where you pooh-poohed the idea that Labour would take Portsmouth South based on the YouGov model, seeing the Lib Dems as the challengers there. As I said in my first comment, it's easy to be wise after the event.
I think that there was a consensus amongst commentators that Tories would do well, that drowned out other signals. In particular it was the wipeout of the kippers which didn't break as expected. Not something likely to be repeated though.
I wonder if the short time from 2015 affected poll weightings. Would the same polls based on 2010 vote weighting rather than 2015 have picked up the churn better?
Churn is intrinsically difficult, as weightings are always fighting the last election.
Edited extra bit: speaking of videogames, has anyone played Pillars of Eternity? Comes out for PS4 in a month or so and was wondering about acquiring it.
It would be good if someone could produce a list of the raw data in a similar format; perhaps with the 'adjusted' result show by a differently-coloured bar on the same axis.
But your first para simply dodges the point. The question is why Labour canvassers thought their youth-oriented strategy wasn't paying any dividends, when it was. My explanation is surely a big part of the answer.
It's also a particular feature of online campaigning that you don't tend to get any reliable feedback.
I think there is a better than negligible chance that something legally very murky indeed involving Trump companies and Russian money will surface. While Trump has shown a remarkable ability to brazen out circumstances which would have felled a more scrupulous man, there comes a point at which that is no longer tenable.
Large sections of the Republican party are in denial at the moment (a recent poll showed 45% don't believe that the Trump Jr./Russia meeting had happened at all, even though he himself has confirmed it...), but I don't think that can last for ever.
Impeachment or resignation is still a fairly long odds prospect, but for me it's realistic enough to dip a toe in the market at current odds.
Added: I'd suggest the health care bill confusion where Trump occupied half a dozen different positions in a day might be a sign his heart is no longer in it.
I was just wondering if the retired naval vote in the city is much greater than the current naval vote, and whether that alters voting patterns.
https://twitter.com/jenwilliamsmen/status/888118597272256514
There was some considerable discussion over this by Constitutional lawyers in the Nixon era and the conclusion is that under a literal interpretation he can.
There would be uproar of course, but such is the lefty media feeding frenzy in the USA right now there's a "crisis" and "calls for impeachment" every time he farts anyway.
Do you know if the reports into it publicly available?
I'll reply as Morris does, as you've slipped all the thread comments in your earlier reply.
There is nothing incompatible with campaigning for votes from unconventional sources whilst measuring progress in a conventional way.
Firstly, the parties have thousands of activists devoting their evenings to pounding the doorsteps, and it is natural and inevitable that the feedback they are getting determines the party view of how things are going. My own seat's Labour MP actually won by 10,000 yet both he and a few of his canvassers I spoke to during the campaign were pessimistic. Secondly, how exactly were they to measure success unconventionally? As I said, the feedback you get from online campaigning is mostly a lot of noise from a small unrepresentative number of recipients.
https://twitter.com/rupertmyers/status/888303800800464896
It is a Headline - one of many that look for impact from thin gruel
It may be true
It may be false
She had a 69% lead over Corbyn when she called the election to a 3% deficit the weekend before the election.
I haven't seen a collapse like that since the French army in 1940.
http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2017/06/04/the-polling-that-should-worry-mrs-may-and-all-tories/
I'm so excited I might wee.
Whoever tipped up Canterbury at 33/1 and backing Labour in Labour held seats odds against, I owe you a pint or two.
"No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.”
He was of course right about Labour's deep illiberal instincts, but significantly overshot in making the point.
The Eiffel Tower is iconic. The Statue of Liberty is too. 'Iconic' is something that is impressive in its own right and also all the more spectacular because it's a symbol of something else.
I'm not sure that 'a ton for 4 shirts' means much more than you can't afford nice shirts.
Moneyweek magazine's investment tip is to buy a house on a busy main road, on grounds that in years to come the traffic noise and pollution will mostly disappear, as will the 25% reduction in property value that typically hits nice houses next to busy roads.
And anyway, the independent operators didn't have any data, only graft. The only way to know what's going on really is via polling. Unfortunately much of Labour's private polling during the election was worse than useless, though there were signs towards the end that they were starting to pick up the vote shift.
My opinion is that parties need to do deep+narrow polling, not thin+wide. ie a few thorough constituency polls that can pick up changes that are missed by canvass returns. Local parties assumed they knew what was going on (and that it was going quite badly) because they were in contact with many thousands of voters. The national party failed the local parties by not plugging the information gap. That gap could've been plugged by better polling rather than by anecdotes from Momentum.
The bottom line is what the Supreme Court might decide - and also, of course, Congress' ability to impeach, which cannot be touched by presidential power.
Clearly it would be an affront to democracy for anyone to exempt themselves from the judgment of the law, but what might happen in the end comes down to the judgment of individuals in those institutions. Republicans in Congress are likely to do whatever they think in their best political interest - standing on principle has not exactly been a conspicuous activity in recent years - but the Supreme Court is far less likely to divide on purely political grounds.
The point is however destroyed by exaggeration - as Churchill proved by suggesting Labour would create a British gestapo - and some of the Tory campaign messages this year made a similar mistake.