Elections – Page 2

UK General Election 2024 #3 – My Forecast as of 23rd June 2024

June 23, 2024 By Nigel Marriott

My first forecast of the number of seats to be won by each party in the 2024 UK General Election is –

CON 108
LAB 442
OTH 100

UK General Election 2024 #2 – My Forecasting Model

June 22, 2024 By Nigel Marriott

My UK General Election 2024 forecasting model will be a top down version which I last used in 2010. Top down approaches first predict how many seats each party will win in total before seeking to identify which seats each party wins. This differs from the bottom-up approach I used in 2017 & 2019 where I forecast the outcome for each seat first and then aggregated the forecasts.

Here I explain how my 2024 forecast will be made but it finishes with a warning that I may have to dump my 2024 model in favour of the forecasting approach I used for the 2015 general election.

UK General Elections #7 – How accurate are voting intention polls? – Revised

June 8, 2024 By Nigel Marriott

Voting intention polls in the UK are accurate after all!

For years, I’ve observed that UK polls on average underestimate the Conservative vote and overestimate Labour’s vote. When I converted poll data into forecasts of seats won, I had to first estimate how much polling error there would be. So what’s changed? It turns out I was comparing polls to the wrong statistic, namely national vote share. The correct comparator is in fact average vote share per seat.

UK General Election 2024 #1 – Going beyond the swing

February 18, 2024 By Nigel Marriott

Labour is on course for a crushing landslide later this year… or are they? Many parallels with 1997 are being drawn at the moment but it’s too early to be making detailed forecasts. Instead, I want to lay the foundations for my election forecast later this year by looking at what 100 years of UK electoral history is telling me. I tell this story by assigning probabilities to 10 specific outcomes of interest and finish by explaining why 2024 is more likely to be a repeat of 2001 than 1997.

I remind you I was deemed the most accurate forecaster of the 2019 general election. This article is the first in what I hope will be a series of articles which lead me to hold on to that accolade!

Voice Referendum #2 – My Forecast Reviewed

November 5, 2023 By Nigel Marriott

Australians rejected the proposed constitutional amendment known as The Voice in a referendum on 14^th October 2023. NO won the national vote by 20.1 percentage points and the state count 6-0 but the more important question is was my forecast right?

Voice Referendum #1 – My Forecast Explained

October 13, 2023 By Nigel Marriott

Australians will reject the proposed constitutional amendment known as The Voice in a referendum on 14^th October 2023. My forecast is for NO to win the national vote by 17 percentage points and win the state count 6-0.

This article was first published on 11th October 2023. My forecast then was for NO to win 16 points and the state count 6-0.

Pay Gap Case Study #6 – How Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister

November 11, 2022 By Nigel Marriott

Rishi Sunak is the UK’s first Prime Minister from a non-white ethnic minority. Did this happen by accident or were the Tories working towards this day over the last 20 years?

A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald by an Australian journalist Latika Burke argues it was the latter. This is well worth reading because it goes into some depth about what the Conservatives did to get to this position. When I combine this article with what I have said before about closing pay and representation gaps, I consider the Conservative party to be a valuable case study for any employer who wishes to close their gaps.

By Elections #3 – Hartlepool + Chesham & Amersham + Batley & Spen = Brexit Realignment?

May 24, 2021 By Nigel Marriott

The Conservatives victory in the Hartlepool by-election means the Brexit realignment of British politics is still taking place … or does it? In fact, Labour’s defeat in Hartlepool for the first time in over 60 years should be put down to tactical voting rather than Brexit realignment, at least for now. It will be the two upcoming by-elections in Batley & Spen on 1st July representing the Red Wall and Chesham & Amersham on 17th June 2021 representing the Blue Sea that will answer the question “Is Brexit realignment is still continuing or did it end in December 2019?”

UK Local Elections #1 – My West England Metro Mayor 2021 Election Forecast

May 2, 2021 By Nigel Marriott

It will be close but I am predicting that the Conservatives will hold onto the West England Combined Authority Metropolitan Mayoralty on 6th May 2021. By rights, they should not be winning but the 3 parties opposing them do not seem to understand the subtleties of the Supplementary Vote (SV) that is used in this election and they will end up splitting their votes to their detriment.

UK General Elections #6 – Keir Starmer’s train to Downing Street

March 21, 2021 By Nigel Marriott

Keir Starmer has to match what Clement Attlee did in 1945 and beat what Tony Blair did in 1997 if he wants to form a Labour government at the next election. To arrive at Downing Street by the end of 2024, Starmer must get his party to board an InterCity 125 train and spend the next 3 years following the tracks I lay out in this article. As I will show, whichever track they take has to go through 125 English Conservative seats, most of which are in between cities. Hence InterCity 125 becomes the easy to remember name of Labour’s list of target seats.