I’m in election prediction overdrive at the moment. Here is a piece on LabourList today about the seat predictor that you are becoming familiar with. Interestingly, Political Betting had a piece today on the limitations of universal national swing projections. In fairness, as Mike Smithson concludes:
“At the moment we are in uncharted territory and you punt at your peril.”
And that goes for any model of seat prediction. However, a group of, well, I guess you’d have to describe them as ‘political junkies’ have decided to go through the election seat by seat and use their personal political knowledge to make seat by seat predictions. And they are not just making the obvious predictions. For example, they call Northampton North for the Liberal Democrats despite the Conservatives sitting in notional second place in the seat currently.
It’s a neat approach and worth keeping an eye on. Personal judgement is a good third option to complex algorithms (the tmg.co.uk/anthonypainter.co.uk approach) or opinion polls and UNS calculations. We’ll see which gets closest in 17 days’ time…
Site of the day is ‘Britain Votes’:
April 19th, 2010 at 20:14
I’ve just used this blog actually. I like their style and they seem to have put real measured thought into most predictions. I think it’ll be very interesting to see how these guys pan out now that UNS is pretty much out the window. UNS is too clumsy. How can it deal with three parties on 30% each?! I’m registered to vote in Northampton North (which is why i felt compelled to write something on this site) and I think the way they look at these predictions has good and bad points. Maybe a few less sarky comments (but most of these MP’s deserve it to be honest!), and i’m sure they give a little too much weight to the negative vote on MP’s expenses, but they tend to cream off the best of all three predictive methods. A little UNS, a little from notionals and polls, and a little political judgement. They seem reasonably credible. Actually a helpful site. Thanks for this one Ant.