Forecasting

UK General Elections #8 – How accurate are voting intention polls? – updated with GE2024

August 4, 2024 By Nigel

After their 2nd best ever performance in the 2019 UK General Election, the UK polling industry flipped in the 2024 UK General Election to their 2nd worst ever performance after 1992. 6 of the last 9 elections have seen at least one party experience a major polling error. It would appear the move to web polling and lower barriers of entry has led to poorer quality polls.

Forecasting #3 – How Accurate are My Election Forecasts?

July 21, 2024 By Nigel

A good forecaster should always provided an easily accessible list of forecasts made, how the forecast was arrived at and how accurate it ended up being. At long last, here is my election forecasting track record updated with the 2024 UK General Election so finally I am a good forecaster I hope!

UK General Election 2024 #5 – My Final Forecast as of 3rd July 2024

July 3, 2024 By Nigel

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

CON 130 (+17)
LAB 420 (-17)
LD 50
SNP 25
GRN 3
PC 2
REF 2
OTH NI 18

The numbers in brackets are the changes from my second forecast of 30th June 2024.

This article is based on polling data as of 2000 on 3rd July 2024. If more polling data comes in and causes me to change my forescript, the changes will be detailed in a postscript at the end of the article.

UK General Election 2024 #4 – My Forecast as of 30th June 2024

June 30, 2024 By Nigel

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

CON 113 (+5)
LAB 437 (-5)
OTH 100 (unch)

The numbers in brackets are the changes from my first forecast of 23rd June 2024.

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

June 23, 2024 By Nigel

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

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 Election 2024 #1 – Going beyond the swing

February 18, 2024 By Nigel

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!

Pay Gap Trends #7 – UK Ethnicity Pay Gap 2012 to 2022

January 3, 2024 By Nigel

In November 2023, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) resumed publishing estimates of the UK Ethnicity Pay Gap after a 3 year hiatus for the Covid19 pandemic. I have organised this data into a user-friendly (hopefully!) Microsoft Excel spreadsheet which allows you to see how the median hourly pay has changed between 2012 & 2022 for a variety of ethnicities & other categories. This article explains how you can use this spreadsheet and why you must look at ethnicity pay gap data in a different way than you would for gender pay gap data.

Voice Referendum #2 – My Forecast Reviewed

November 5, 2023 By Nigel

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

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.