politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Even with Scotland will LAB still be able to win more seat
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Even with Scotland will LAB still be able to win more seats than CON for the same national vote share?
One of the massive questions hanging over the May 7th outcome is the impact of what we are all familiar with – electoral bias that has meant that there’s a long history of LAB getting more seats for the same vote share than the Tories.
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Balding Men's Forum Fight Over Comb
My taxi driver on the way in to work today, who voted UKIP at the Euros, is going to vote Labour at the General (Hendon), on the basis that "Dismal was a good MP last time around, and that Farage is a bit shouty." He was a lifelong Labour supporter, who's 2010 vote for the Conservatives, and 2014 vote for UKIP were the only two times he's ever "crossed the line".
Can't quite believe potentially losing 40 odd seats in Scotland won't affect this.
If Cameron had ignored him and spent the campaign boring everyone with deficit reduction and austerity they would now be romping home.
Instead he's achieved the impossible. By insisting on seven at the debates followed by his no show he's not only made Ed look Prime Ministerial but also the leader of a nation wide centre left revival with three very impressive female leaders vying for his favours.
Dave of all people should understand the value of a USP so why he threw his away with an anti austerity manifesto and engineered one for Ed is baffling
Roger said:
When this campaign started the immovable object was that Ed couldn't be a Prime Minister.
If Cameron had ignored him and spent the campaign boring everyone with deficit reduction and austerity they would now be romping home.
Instead he's achieved the impossible. By insisting on seven at the debates he's not only made Ed look Prime Ministerial but also the leader of a nation wide centre left revival with three very impressive female leaders vying for his favours.
Dave of all people should understand the value of a USP so why he threw his away with an anti austerity manifesto and engineered one for Ed is a mystery.
But he is surrounded by back slapping public schoolboys who think politics is a jolly jape.
Witness the crowing on here when the new debate formats were announced.
"Game, set and match to Cameron" they said
"Miliband has been outplayed" they said
Same mentality as led to a botched coup attempt against Bercow on the last day of parliament
Scotland
Tories picking up Lib Dem seats.
UKIP reducing some silly Tory majorities.
Labour picking up red Liberals in seats they can't actually win.
Probably a marginally better turnout in safe Labour seats than we saw the last time.
But when the turnout in safe Labour seats is struggling to break 60% and turnout in safe Tory seats is pushing 70% "bias" is inevitable. This is added to by the existing boundaries which make an Inner City vote worth so much more than a rural one.
If the 2 main parties end up with a tie I expect Labour to be 20-30 seats ahead despite Scotland. A much smaller bias than Blair enjoyed in 2005 but a bias none the less. It is why I have gone for a smallish Labour plurality in our competition.
My estimates:
LibDems 57
- Labour losses 7
- Conservative losses 19
- SNP losses 8
= 23
Labour losses could be as high as 11; Conservative losses could be as high as 25; UKIP losses could be as high as 11.
However, on my model the LibDems only lose 9 to the Conservatives at 11%, but lose 25 at 9%. Lots of squeaky bums on May 7th and 8th!
Still some bias left, mostly due to boundaries, but some of the dafter bias within exisitng constituencies are due a shake up.
We need a "none of the above" box!
With Grexit looming though, might be a good election to lose even though I know that is omertà. And one day soon some party or other will have to actually address the structure of the NHS instead of just chucking more borrowed money at it and wondering why demand is still outstripping supply.
BTW- very good post. I cannot even quite believe that the election is this tight- everything is in the Tories favour. They should be romping home as you said. Something has gone wrong somewhere with their strategy.
@ElectionsEtc: NEW #GE2015 FORECAST: 11% chance of Con majority, 0% Lab majority, 89% hung parliament http://t.co/YFsXEnoaGO http://t.co/kJJG8WrhbL
My good lady tells me her work colleagues, public sector and mostly female, are mostly intent on abstaining.
My daughter's facebook was largely clogged up last night with 'we're screwed if Sturgeon and Miliband get in' and 'why does Miliband keep ducking questions and saying 'what about Cameron?'
"Jeez Roger. That big black thing in your photo- did it fly into your house?"
The answer is a long one but the short version is that it's a rook that has been living with my cousin in Aberdeen for the last 24 years and which is documented here
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corvus-Life-Birds-Esther-Woolfson/dp/1847080804/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429255113&sr=8-1&keywords=corvus#reader_1847080804
I've just been watching a Guardian video on Facebook about my old home town, now described as Farageland (Boston). An interesting analysis of the problem. Massive immigration has distorted the economy; good for the framers, bad for the workers, yet Labour are supportive.
On one side, the view that the locals should get off their arses and work. On the other, the view that it's good for the local economy.
The problem in a nutshell and the reason for Ukip's rise. When I worked on the land there, it was a different time. The work was hard but available. I wondered how many Guardian reporters would be happy to 'get off their arses' and do those hours for the good of the economy.
Mutual incomprehension.
Back in 2001, it was estimated that on equal vote shares, Labour would be 140 seats ahead of the Conservatives.
It's now certain that JackW's ARSE will crap itself on the real results of the GE. How I will laugh.
That ARSE could take quite a beating
LD and UKIP will be navel gazing as to future direction and the Tories infighting over Europe and the Election.
But: polls have been wrong many times and they only need to be a few % out to give a very different result, either a Lab majority or a Con one. Polls in 2010 at this stage did not accurately predict the result. They were mid Cleggasm and that turned out to be a fiction.
My one caveat is that this is if the votes are broadly equal. If Labour are ahead they will still get much heavier and more dramatic rewards for that than the Tories do with large slews of the 2010 Tory gains falling Labour's way making their vote ever more efficient. Labour last time were only lightly penalised for losing. The Tories would pay a much heavier price in terms of seats.
Moore's law is fifty years old this weekend.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32335003
I remember, about 25 years ago when I first got really interested in chip design (*), people predicting that it would not last another five or ten years.
For me, the saddest thing about Moore's law is that chips have got so complex that it's virtually impossible for an outsider to understand how modern chips work in detail. Caches are easy, so is pipelining. I even *think* I understood how the early GPUs worked.
But it has got so complex that, even if you can get the information, I give up and just go with the abstracted specs, rather than trying to understand how it works underneath the hood.
(*) At the time of the great RISC vs CISC religious wars. ;-)
A charming and very compassionate story. I am a sucker for anyone who sees wildlife as anything more than vermin, or something to take pleasure in killing.
"It's clearly also delivering results because when we look at the comparative growth rates delivered by various countries in Europe, it's obvious that what's happening in the UK has actually worked," she said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32346214
I am imagine Dave is looking at five years of pain and thinking "nah".
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-im-being-racially-abused-i-dont-need-a-white-stranger-with-a-saviour-complex-to-rescue-me-10182308.html
Now long until the singularity marks the beginning of our overthrow by superior artificial intelligence.
It is perhaps the soap powder election. All the parties are dressed up in different coloured boxes claiming remarkable results but they are all pretty much going to do the same thing.
What a stupid election-losing cretin that man is.
Of course Ed and the others put the boot in. Why wouldn't they. Fair play to them.
EdM looks more and more prime ministerial as every day passes in this campaign, he hasn't put a foot wrong. Whereas Dave just coasts along, hardly bothering.
I'm warming to Ed. There's something in my make-up that, politics of it aside, wants Ed to win just for doing a good job, being human, and socking it to his detractors. And wants Dave to vanish into obscurity pronto, for turning out to be one of the biggest disappointments, wet blankets and let-downs in living memory.
However, if their current poll average includes the latest ICM, it is skewed.
As said, why are they not well ahead in the polls? They bloody well should be.
Although I didn't really get to grips with it, the machine was an interesting one. Stuff like that only existed for a brief time, and seems really rather alien now.
It brought it all back. The earnest left-wingers, intimidating in their different brands of moral certainty. The facetious right-winger who goes along, sometimes in a bow tie, to wind them up. While most normal students have essays to write, French subtitles to read or pizza to eat.
Ed Miliband was back in the Corpus Christi Junior Common Room.
[...]
Nicola Sturgeon was more progressive than Miliband, because she has a Scottish accent. As was Leanne Wood, because she has a Welsh one, and Natalie Bennett because she is an immigrant from Australia. But Ed is a member of the student council and so he has to take difficult decisions.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/election-catchup-are-you-coming-to-the-student-union-no-ive-got-something-better-to-do-10183682.html
The voters to date seem fairly switched off.
So far we have about the usual 450 seats where the result is a foregone conclusion but circa 200 where anything can happen ( 150 EW marginals plus 50 Scotland )
Scotland on paper should be a foregone conclusion looking at the polls but the interest sits round how sticky is Labour and have the Nats overramped again ?
In E&W marginals a percentage or two either way will swing a lot of seats and that has many imponderables - turnout, vote drift for the larger parties ( Tories UKIP, Labour Green) , LD fortresses, anti-politics mood.
So really all to play for for the parties but for the voters it's looking like a poor set of choices all round.
If we assume that boundary changes would have delivered an extra 20 seats to the Tories and and 20 less for Labour then the UK totals would be 301 Tory and 265 Labour.As the campaign progresses Dave may increasingly rue the day he allowed the Tory right wing to torpedo Lord's Reform.
"A charming and very compassionate story."
It is and 'Chicken' is a most extraordinary bird.
The political angle is that her daughter is the partner of an Edinburgh MP. He was very lucky to take the seat at the last election and has a tiny majority but he's very nice and hard working and from a very humble background but it's very tough up there..... .
But ignoring this point for a second, one of the key reasons why British people don't want to do poorly paid seasonal work is that our tax and benefits system actively discourages it.
If you go and take a job in Norfolk in the fields, you need to sign off, you need to give up your housing benefit, and you probably need to apply for working tax credits.
All for six weeks work.
And then you have to sign on again. And fill in masses of paperwork. And maybe it'll be three months before your benefits are reinstated.
We have created a system which actively discourages British people from taking these jobs.
Hence why the Tories shouldn't worry about being a couple of points down on 2010 because they could still end up on broadly the same number of seats.
"Disagree. What I think we're seeing very clearly is an electorate that for the most part simply doesn't see the challenges this country faces. I found the questions and responses last night to be pretty scary on the whole. Magicmoneytreeism is alive and well in UK lalaland. And this puts CCHQ in a big quandary - is it about getting elected or talking sense? The two seem diametrically opposed to me. If Dave starts saying the things he might need to say to get elected he'll be torn apart by the 'sound money / common sense' world and if he talks sound money and common sense he's going to get torn apart by the spendy mob. I have almost no symapthy for Greece or Venezuela or Argentina etc because they have elected their lunatics again and again and again for decades. A fucked up general public attitude to financial sound management, wealth creation and how advanced economies can survive and compete will lead to their countries getting fucked up. Our general public attitudes in the UK are fucked up and naive too - as was so lamentably on display last night. I fear we're going to elect some very economically fucked up bozos to run the place and when it all goes pear shaped, as it inevitably will, somehow it's going to be Fatcha's fault. Maybe we should blame the BBC and our education system. In a world where knowledge is at everyone's fingertips how is it possible for so many to be so very misguided?"
Oh dear, oh dear. Blaming a misguided electorate is one step away from totalitarianism.
I was hoping to elicit a more sophisticated response. My feeling is that the Tories have overthought their campaign. Osborne is far too political, and Cameron is too scripted- therefore they find connecting with the electorate difficult. I think the spectre of Osborne and Crosby looming over every facet of the campaign inhibits- for instance Osborne riding off the IMF today just seems like a political stunt. The public were sick of stunts after the Brown years.
An effective politician needs to connect naturally to the voters- Cameron had this once, and Boris Johnson has it in spades. And Miliband, with his cow eyes and resilience, is beginning to win people over.
Personally, I have bet large on some kind of Lab minority or coalition, but I remain flabbergasted that the late swing back to the incumbent Tories with an economy on the mend doesn't seem to be happening. Maybe it will be as one of the pollsters (Ben Page i think) told Newsnight and the late swing will only happen on the day of the actual election.
Up to around ten years ago, the 'speed' of a processor was judged by the clock speed. But recently it's been stuck around the 3-4GHz mark for consumer chips.
My wife and I, reflecting on the debates etc over the breakfast table, both felt the same.
It's also the sort of problem that a citizen's income helps to solve.
Not that I particularly blame the Lib Dems for reneging - boundary reform had the potential to be an extinction-level event for them given how much they depend on incumbency.
He's only really emergised when he is angry and that is not a pretty picture.
* Somewhat marred by being padded out to two episodes rather than just one.
This is an election fronted only by newbies who all seem to turn off the electorate.
There are a lot of people out there who recoil at the metropolitan middle-classes and the associated (perceived) patronising way they are spoken to by professional politicians.
The audience and politicians - bar Farage - on stage, embodied a world that is alien to them.
I suspect they would've disliked the way Farage was hounded last night for his views. Many out there will share the same views and fears and Farage was the only one on stage presenting an anti-EU, steady-on-immigration stance.
In contrast there was a lot of identikit, political correctness.
It didn't look great for Farage on telly but I bet loads at home were secretly agreeing with him and the way he was harangued will consolidate their votes.
I doubt she will (she may vote Green which may be nearly as good as voting Tory in our Lab with small majority constituency), but it was interesting to see a left-leaner actually contemplating a Tory vote knowing that EdM is (she feels) incapable of winning a majority and the prospect of him sharing power with the SNP repellent; if Labour was romping ahead in the polls and Ed looked more up to the job, there wouldn't be any internal quandary in her mind at all.
Tried to make up for it since
I can see the Tories falling to 30% in the polls over the weekend, if not below that floor.
The writing's been on the wall for ages, and once again, and not wishing to blow my own trumpet, I seem to have been one of the few people to have foreseen what is now becoming obvious.
Well, that turned out well didn't it David....
Just because you write portentously and pessimistically doesn't mean your forecasts have any more validity than anyone else's.