Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

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EU Referendum #4 – Find your way out of the Brexit maze in 43 Days!

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Rather than celebrating love on Valentine’s day, Parliament chose to use the occasion to emphasise their discord over the EU withdrawal process, 43 days before the UK is due to leave the EU.  Three amendments were voted on and this allows me to update my Brexit voting blocks which I first described in “Find your way out of the Brexit maze in 57 days!”.

This post was updated on 20th February 2019 to take into account the resignations of 8 MPs from the Labour party. and 3 MPs from the Conservative party.

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EU Referendum #3 – Find your way out of the Brexit maze in 57 days!

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January 2019 has been a month of considerable parliamentary drama in the UK as MPs wrestle over whether to approve the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and the EU.  There is no shortage of political punditry and quotes from politicians and the whole episode is proving to be a classic example of uncertainty.  For statisticians like myself, uncertainty occurs when you cannot properly price the odds of an event happening unlike risk which occurs when you can price the odds.  Since the current state of affairs will ultimately be determined by parliamentary votes one way or the other, is it possible to use parliamentary vote data so far to estimate the odds of certain scenarios?

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UK General Elections #4 – Jeremy Corbyn’s road to Downing Street

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The fevered political climate in the UK at the moment is all about Brexit and possible second referendums and general elections.  Jeremy Corbyn made it clear recently that he wanted a General Election now so that he could take over the Brexit negotiations.  With that in mind, I decided to take a look at what Labour’s target seat strategy could look like based on the results of the 2017 general election.  What I see at the moment is that Labour has many ways of becoming the largest party in Parliament but the road to a working majority is much harder than people realise due to the Brexit realignment in 2016 and the Nationalist realignment in Scotland in 2015.

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US Presidential Election 2020 #1 – Will Donald Trump win a 2nd term in 2020?

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In a week’s time, Americans will go to the polls for what is known as the mid-term elections.  Inevitably, the results will lead to much speculation on what it means for Donald Trump’s chances of re-election in 2020.  However, I will be surprised if many commentators will look to history as a guide to 2020 and so I will fill in this gap with the help of fun 10 question quiz about US presidents.

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Forecasting#2 – Do Election Pollsters Show Forecasting Skill?

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As I write this, a plethora of economic forecasts are making the rounds in the news in the UK.  In all cases, the forecasters have failed to publish their track record and these days, I will not pay attention to what they say unless their forecasts are accompanied by a track record.  But, how does one go about presenting a forecasting track record to prove that one has forecasting skill?  To demonstrate, I will analyse how well opinion polls have predicted General Elections in the UK and measure their track record.  I must confess I was surprised at what I found out and I would urge all opinion pollsters to take note of my results.

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UK General Elections #3 – Who is the most accurate pollster?

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The last 3 general elections have seen some significant polling errors.  In 2010, the Lib Dems were significantly overestimated, in 2015 the Conservatives were underestimated and last year saw the largest ever underestimate in the Labour vote.  Whilst these errors suggest that the polling industry is struggling with general elections these days, a natural question to ask is “are all pollsters equally bad or are some better than others?”

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UK General Election 2017 #7 – Review of my predictions

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Exactly one month ago, the UK woke up to the news that they had elected a hung parliament for the second time in 3 elections.  For many forecasters including myself, this came as a surprise as I had been predicting a Conservative majority of 100 seats.  In the event, the largest ever polling underestimate of the Labour vote was enough to see the Conservatives lose their majority.

At the beginning of my commentary on election night itself, I defined success for my forecasts as being how close the number of Conservative seats was to my forecast of 375.  I also stated that if the number of seats was in the 340s I would consider this to be a prediction error.  The final outcome was 317 seats so clearly that is a major prediction error.

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UK General Elections #2 – How accurate are the opinion polls? – updated with GE17

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Ahead of the 2017 general election, I predicted that the opinion polls would be wrong again and that the Conservatives lead over Labour would be underestimated by 2.6%.   I based this on data provided by Mark Pack who has systematically recorded every opinion poll published since 1945.  In the event, I was right that the polls would be wrong but instead of an error favouring the Conservatives, the polls recorded the largest ever underestimate of the Labour vote.  As a result, election forecasters were blindsided yet again and the result was a hung parliament which few saw coming.

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UK General Election 2017 Results #1 – My Election Night Commentary

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Friday 07:35 – I’ve just woken up to the result that we have a hung parliament which is miles away from my prediction.  Clearly I need to conduct a post-mortem of my model but I did state in my first chart of this post (see bottom of post) that a hung parliament would occur if the CON-LAB lead was under 3%.  Sure enough that is the outcome with the BBC currently saying the CON-LAB lead is 2.3%.  What it also means that we have another epic polling error as the average of all polls in the week before the election showed a CON-LAB lead of 7.5%.  Unlike 2015 when all pollsters got it, congratulations must go to Survation who called it spot on.

I am sure we will have a wave of people claiming to have predicted this error.  As far as I am concerned a valid prediction is only one made in public in advance.  Such a prediction would also need to explain why they expected a polling error on the scale shown in the chart.

The last time such an error occurred was 1983 and the error is on the scale of 1951!  In fact the error is even more remarkable if you look at the 3 main parties.

Another polling post mortem beckons but this election will go down in history.

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UK General Election 2017 Forecast #4 – My Official Prediction as of 4th June 2017

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My official prediction using my Final Election Model is that the Conservatives will make a net gain of 45 seats resulting in a working majority of 105 seats.

My forecast uses data from my latest UK Opinion Poll Tracker and it is worth reading that post in conjunction with this post.  At the bottom of this post is a spreadsheet containing my prediction for each seat.  I am basing all figures in this forecast on the assumption that Conservatives will have a 9.5% lead over Labour on June 8th.  I arrive at that figure by taking the current CON-LAB lead of 7% in the latest polls and adding an expected 2.5% underestimate in the Conservative lead over Labour based on my analysis of historical polling errors.  A knock-on effect of this assumption is that I expect turnout to be 2pts higher at 68%.

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