Here is a long overdue update of my UK opinion poll tracker and in this post, I going to take a closer look at the key trends over the last 12 months.
UK Opinion Poll Tracker #11 – March 2018
For my latest Opinion Poll Tracker, I will explore 4 points currently being debated by political pundits.
- Have the Conservatives taken the lead in the polls?
- How much weight should we give to Survation polls who were the most accurate in 2017 and are the outlier poll today?
- Was there a “Youthquake” in the 2017 general election?
- What would the effect be of allowing 16 & 17 year olds to vote in general elections?
UK General Elections #3 – Who is the most accurate pollster?
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
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 Election 2017 Results #1 – My Election Night Commentary
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 #6 – Everything you need to know in one place!
Over the last 6 weeks I have been making many posts about what is happening and what will happen in 2017. I thought it would be helpful to have one post which brings everything together in one place.
My official 2017 election forecast summarises what I expect the results to be on June 8th 2017. This post also includes a link to a spreadsheet containing my seat by seat forecasts which can be found at the bottom of that post. (EDIT: Weds 7th June @1030AM. If you downloaded the spreadsheet before 1030 on Weds 7th June, please visit the link and download the spreadsheet again. The link explains why)
To accompany my forecast, I have created 4 youtube video clips where I dig into the details of how I arrived at that forecast.
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UK Opinion Poll Tracker #6 – 4th June 2017
This is my last update of the opinion before election day on June 8th. I will use my analysis of these polls to update my 2017 General Election Seat Predictions and you should read that post in conjunction with this one.
The latest situation is that the Conservatives now only hold a 7% lead over Labour which is down 2% from last week and only just above what they had in 2015. Labour’s vote share has recovered significantly to narrow the Conservatives lead and Labour are now capable under some scenarios of depriving the Conservatives of a majority. However, it has now become clear that pollsters are dividing into two groups and I have written a separate post that explores the implications of this and I strongly recommend you read that. This post reports on all posters combined rather than separate blocs.
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UK General Election 2017 Forecast #4 – My Official Prediction as of 4th June 2017
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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UK General Election 2017 Forecast #5 – 5 steps to making sense of the latest polls!
Unlike the 2015 general election when the polls were essentially static (& wrong) throughout the election, the 2017 general election has seen some of the most extraordinary volatility in the polls that I can remember. If you are a Conservative supporter, the narrowing lead over Labour must be leading to anxiety and changed underwear. If you are a Labour supporter, you are probably starting to dream “can we? will we?!” It doesn’t help that your state of mind will depend on which poll you are reading and your memories of the pollsters’ failure in 2015 so how can you make sense of what is going on. I will show you how in 5 steps and to heighten the drama, I will leave the punchline to the end!
UK 2017 General Election Forecast #3 – A Description of my Final Model
For the last 6 weeks, I have been making forecasts of the number of seats that each party will get in the 2017 General Election. If you have been following my forecasts, you will know that I have developed a variety of prediction models which all predict something different. With 10 days to go, I decided it was high time to settle on a single Final Model which is described in this post.
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