{"id":475,"date":"2017-05-13T23:40:26","date_gmt":"2017-05-13T22:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/?p=475"},"modified":"2019-02-09T11:02:49","modified_gmt":"2019-02-09T11:02:49","slug":"uk-general-election-2017-seat-forecast-5-north-norfolk-east-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/uk-general-election-2017-seat-forecast-5-north-norfolk-east-england\/","title":{"rendered":"UK General Election 2017 Seat Forecast #5 – North Norfolk, East England"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is my first seat forecast\u00a0from the Eastern region and I have chosen the seat of North Norfolk for two reasons.\u00a0 First it is one of only 8 seats held by the Lib Dems in 2015 and one of\u00a03 Lib Dem-Leave seats.\u00a0 Second, it is one of 23 seats in Britain this election\u00a0that will be fought between only 3 candidates from the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats<\/a>.\u00a0 Both UKIP and the Greens have decided not to stand in this seat and this will be a good seat to examine my model for handling the votes of parties that stand down.<\/p>\n

My Prediction –\u00a0CON GAIN but extremely marginal<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

My first seat forecast was for the CON\/LD battleground of Bath in the South West <\/a>and in that post I describe my 3 forecasting models in some depth so please read that post if you are unfamiliar with these.\u00a0 However, now that we know the number of candidates in each constituency, I have created an additional model to handle stand downs by parties so there are now 4 predictions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. URS – Uniform Regional Swing model based on chart R1 of my Opinion Poll Tracker<\/a>.\u00a0 This will no longer be my main forecast<\/li>\n
  2. URS + Standown – my URS forecast modified for parties standing down, which will be explained in this post.\u00a0 This is now my main forecast model.<\/li>\n
  3. URS + Tactical – my URS forecast + Standown\u00a0plus my tactical voting model and is now my alternative forecasting model.<\/li>\n
  4. EU16 Realign – my Brexit Realignment model based on my by-election forecasting model <\/a>but with some tweaks.\u00a0 For now, I am not regarding this as a forecast, rather it is a sense check for my other forecasts.\u00a0 Please note I have not displayed the breakdown by the 5 EU16 voter segments in the table below as I have done before.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    North Norfolk was a strong (62%)\u00a0Leave seat in 2016 and with only an 8% majority over the Conservatives in 2015, it will be a tough fight for the Lib Dems to hold onto this seat.\u00a0 The key to what happens in 2017 will be the 17% who voted UKIP\u00a0and the 3% who voted Green in 2015.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    One piece of good news for the Lib Dems is that the polls are showing that their vote is up 4% from 2015 in the Eastern region as shown in chart R2.\u00a0 This\u00a0is the same information as displayed for\u00a0the East in chart R1 of my Opinion Poll Tracker<\/a>.\u00a0 Chart\u00a0R3 is the rolling 15 poll\u00a0median for the\u00a0Eastern\u00a0crossbreaks of all the polls.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    Until now, I have used these figures to generate my URS prediction.\u00a0 As can be seen in the table,\u00a0the Lib Dems hold onto the seat with a reduced majority of 5% as shown by the URS line.\"\"\u00a0 This also shows that had the Greens and UKIP been standing, we would have expected vote shares of 2% and 8% respectively,\u00a0but they are not standing so where will those votes go?<\/p>\n

    One response might be not to vote.\u00a0 At the moment, I have no information that this is what they will do and so my assumption for now is that they will vote.\u00a0 Given a choice of 3 parties CON, LAB & LD which ones will they choose?\u00a0 My answer is shown in the table below which differs between England, Scotland & Wales.<\/p>\n

    Before I explain how I arrived at that table, let me list two\u00a0assumptions I have made.<\/p>\n