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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Irish General Election 2020 : Predictions & Review, Part One
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Irish General Election 2020 : Predictions & Review, Part One
Last week, Leo Varadkar called an early Dáil Election. Will his choice backfire or will he get another term? Find out below.
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https://twitter.com/siennamarla/status/1221447692267741185
https://twitter.com/CLPNominations/status/1221450263669678084
"Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) Pete Buttigieg will close out his campaign in Iowa focusing on his ability to win over disaffected Republicans who backed President Donald Trump in 2016, his campaign tells CNN, hoping that Democrats who are hellbent on defeating Trump in November will be wooed by a candidate who can eat into the President's support."
There have been three polls since the election was announced. All of them show Fianna Fáil in first place, with Fine Gael second, with leads of 3, 2 and 12 points; the 12-point lead looks a bit of an outlier. All three show Sinn Fein up substantially since the last election, on 19% to 21% compared with 13.8% (first prefs) in 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2020_Irish_general_election
Irish politics over the past three years or so had been dominated by Brexit, but the two main parties don't differ much on this, and in any case this election is taking place at a time where there is a pause in the Brexit drama. Healthcare and housing are the two big issues this time, with Fine Gael as the governing party getting it in the neck because of major issues in the health service, delays in the building of a new Dublin hospital, and a major crisis on housing. It's hard to see any outcome from this other than Fianna Fáil becoming the largest party and its leader Micheál Martin becoming the next Taoiseach, but exactly what the make-up of the next government will be is very hard to predict. Fianna Fáil would like to govern with the Greens or Labour, but on current polling the numbers don't look to be there. Last time it took months for the then Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny to put together a government, eventually with the support of some independents and a confidence & supply arrangement with arch-enemies Fianna Fáil. This time the result may well be just as indecisive.
Newcastle also offers free parking every day of the year after 5pm which also works very well to encourage people to come into the city centre to shop and eat after work.
I don’t know if other towns and cities do this but it seems to be quite effective.
STV, with so many candidates and several seats per constituency, is fiendishly complicated. Yet my Irish family assure me that the electorate understands it. Not in full detail but to the extent that they don't make stupid decisions out of misplaced "tactics", and they do use later preferences if they have them. I found it hilarious when No to AV campaigned on the idea that far simpler system was too complicated for the British electorate....
The other thing about it is that, contrary to perceptions of PR, it delivers a huge individual vote, at least in rural constituencies like Donegal. It isn't assumed that voters will place all candidates from the same party next to one another. Back when there was a North-East Donegal, people sometimes put the candidates of all parties on their side of the Swilly ahead of candidates on the other side (not that this is necessarily a good thing).
Good luck predicting it, but it's one of the most interesting countries to follow.
I suspect that they have just cocked it by creating a £4 day rate for business employees, who should be either parking further away or on push / e-bikes.
But Zadrozzle has got several 10s of millions from various funds which will probably make some differences.
(Which is another reason why a unitary Council at County Level would be the curse of the devil. Control has to be at perceived community level not with some turbo-apparatchik 25 miles away.
I was working is Oswestry when the execrable Hazel Blears pithed that town a bit more than a decade ago because NuLab thought unified Shropshire would save 0.0012 of a bin lorry).
That means that everyone who voted for that candidate used up 10,000/15,000 = 2/3 of their vote getting that candidate over the line.
They therefore each have 1/3 of a vote left, and their 2nd preference votes count carry a third as much weight as in subsequent rounds.
That's my understanding, anyway.
Around here there is a very sharp contrast between Mansfield and Chesterfield - the latter still has a 250 stall market twice a week; the former has nothing like that in the centre even though I can point to several major businesses (FTSE250) in the area which have grown up locally in the last 30 or so years. There's a civic life thing to be addressed too.
Both are around 70k people.
I think the distinction between towns and cities is pretty academic. The last 20 years have really been all types of govts handing out cheap rosettes because it is easy.
https://www.thejournal.ie/how-does-prstv-work-2619448-Feb2016/
There are great numbers of people who struggle with many of the things we take for granted.
That's an argument for Starmer, perhaps - he does calm like nobody's business. Add optimism (Boris's trademark) and you have two components of successful leadership.
The Betfair market is here and I'm helping develop this market.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.131734096
I won on the last Irish GE (FG minority at 7/1)
The interesting feature of Green Machine's analysis (which only covers half the seats) is how well he thinks the Greens will do.
I make it 24 FF, 19 FG, 11 SF, 8 Grn, 4 Ind, 3 Lab, 2 SBP, 1 SD for half the seats.
I think you can ignore majorities for FF or FG because of STV.
Perhaps you can also ignore FF/SF and FG/SF based on what FF and FG have said.
The only other significant player is the Greens. So I'm looking at some alliance with the Greens or FF minority (with C&S) or FG minority (with C&S) again.
Or perhaps the grand alliance of FF/FG with Martin as Taoiseach if the two parties can put the Civil War behind them after nearly a 100 years. That's really all that separates them.
https://politicalreform.ie/2020/01/15/early-2020-election-predictions/
Unfortunately it's two weeks old and before the latest polls came out.
Adrian Kavanagh, who in previous election has published modelling of how opinion polls might map to seats, doesn't seem to have produced anything so far this time, but perhaps he's working on it. If he does publish anything, it will be well worth following.
That doesn't mean that many people can explain how the transfers work. It means that they recognise that the best thing to do is to rank the candidates in your sincere order of preference, that this will won't hurt your first-preference and may help your later preferences.
All voting systems are theoretically open to tactical voting, but in practice this one isn't because nobody has a sufficiently precise knowledge of how other people will vote. That removes all the agonising about tactics, which has to be a good thing.
https://twitter.com/SocReview/status/1221474027501432832?s=20
Labour are now more likely to direct venom at the SNP than at whatever latest xenophobe fest Farage has dreamed up.
Johnson scores on optimism and clarity. Not so high on reliability.
Blair scored highly on all four until he came to be seen as unreliable (Bliar).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity–People_Before_Profit
And British resentment of London can't hold a candle to Irish resentment of Dublin.
If you think Scottish Nationalism 'is all about identity' you really haven't being paying attention. Can't blame you, apparently serious professional politicians running for the leadership of the Labour party have been doing the same. The tartan Tories trope is a sure sign of such a cloth eared dunderhead.
In order to vote you don't need to be able to run an STV election, it is literally as simple as 1, 2, 3.
Even running an STV election is not difficult if you're vaguely numerate.
Making your metric proportion of 18 year olds with 5 A-Cs at GCSE, for example, encourages schools to concentrate on those children who wouldn't get over the line without help.
Ultimately, it needs a sophisticated balanced scorecard approach. Which it's not going to get.
Unless the Chinese are involved in a massive cover up of the number of people dying of this thing, it does seem all a little bit over the top. Although from what I have read "normal" flu has a mortality rate of around 1% but you can't draw a direct comparison as Flu has a vaccination, whereas this, currently, doesn't. So 2-3% mortality and no vaccine, is obviously many times worse than 1% with a vaccine. But probably a vaccine will be developed soon.
It mirrors the highly successful Swiss education system.
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200125-sitrep-5-2019-ncov.pdf?sfvrsn=429b143d_4
One should also not underestimate the determination of FF to return to power. 10 years without bribes is a long time.
One recent complicating factor to this story is gender quotas. This causes the large parties to field larger slates than is locally optimal for winning seats, because fielding enough women is globally optimal for retaining public campaign funding.
Hillary 48%
Trump 46%
For a really neat visualisation of STV counts, try this:
https://council17.mulvenna.org/results/
Man wrongfully arrested given £100k compensation by police
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-51255287
In nine years, it’s difficult to think of anything to do with Police Scotland that hasn’t been an utter fiasco. At what point will the SNP admit Police Scotland has been the most epic law enforcement clusterfuck since the Keystone Cops and replace it in its entirety with new local forces?
*Although this does of course partly explain why the SNP are getting away with a dismal domestic record.