Politics

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 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.

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 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.

UK General Election 2019 #2 – My forecast is the most accurate & beats the Exit Poll!

December 16, 2019 By Nigel Marriott

At 2200 on Thursday 12th December 2019, the BBC/ITV/Sky Exit Poll was revealed to the nation and pointed to a large majority for the Conservatives. Unlike 2017, I was able to turn to my wife and say “it looks like I will be right this time!” By the end of the night, Gavin Freeguard from the Institute of Government was tweeting that not only was I the most accurate election forecaster of 2019, I was more accurate than the Exit Poll.

UK General Election 2019 #1 – My Official Forecast

December 12, 2019 By Nigel Marriott

My forecast for the 2019 UK General Election this Thursday is that the Conservatives will win a majority of 72 seats. The margin of error in this forecast is very wide though due to the fact that 5 of of the last 7 general elections have seen a major polling error. If there is a repeat of the GE2017 underestimate of Labour, then there will be another hung Parliament.

EU Election 2019 #1 – How many MEPs will each party win?

May 21, 2019 By Nigel Marriott

Here is my forecast for the election that was not supposed to be happening in the UK. The Brexit Party is well on course to be the largest party and could even set the record for the best ever vote share by a party in the d’Hondt era of EU elections in the UK. At the same time, the Liberal Democrats have the possibility of beating both the Conservatives and Labour parties in a UK-wide election for the first time since 1906.

EU Referendum #6 – Find your way out of the Brexit maze in 9 Days!

March 20, 2019 By Nigel Marriott

Theresa May has just asked the EU Council for a 3 month extension to Article 50, the Speaker won’t allow another meaningful vote without meaningful changes, Jeremy Corbyn is pondering backing another referendum and in 9 days time, the UK could be leaving the EU without a deal. Just another week in the Parliamentary Brexit Maze but I have updated my Brexit Voting Factions after last week’s votes and identified an 8th faction for you to play with in your voting permutations.
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