{"id":501,"date":"2017-05-15T17:29:26","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T16:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/?p=501"},"modified":"2019-02-09T10:59:10","modified_gmt":"2019-02-09T10:59:10","slug":"uk-general-election-2017-seat-forecast-6-edinburgh-south-scotland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/uk-general-election-2017-seat-forecast-6-edinburgh-south-scotland\/","title":{"rendered":"UK General Election 2017 Seat Forecast #6 – Edinburgh South, Scotland"},"content":{"rendered":"

For my first Scottish seat forecast, I head\u00a0up to Labour’s last seat in Scotland.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I have just become aware of a constituency poll in Edinburgh that took place at the beginning of April\u00a0before the election was called but the data has only just been released by Survation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At first sight the poll is bad news for the Conservatives and good news for Labour but I will show that in fact the reverse is the case and that the poll is further evidence that a Brexit Realignment\u00a0may be taking place.\u00a0 If so, the Conservatives majority in Parliament will be larger than current predictions are showing.<\/p>\n

My Prediction –\u00a0LAB Hold<\/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 and in this seat, both UKIP & the Greens are standing down (though when the poll took place it was assumed that both parties would be contesting the seat).\u00a0 Also this post will deal\u00a0with a 5th model that is currently under development and is particularly relevant to this poll.<\/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+S – my URS forecast modified for parties standing down which is explained in my North Norfolk prediction<\/a>.\u00a0 This is now my main forecast model.<\/li>\n
  3. URS+T – my URS forecast + Standown\u00a0plus my tactical voting model and is now my alternative forecasting model.<\/li>\n
  4. EU16R – 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.<\/li>\n
  5. nURS – Non Uniform Regional Swing model which was first explored in my Cardiff South & Penarth prediction<\/a>.\u00a0 This model is still under development but is explored further in this post.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Edinburgh South was Labour’s only surviving seat in 2015 with a 5% majority over the SNP.\u00a0 With 78% voting Remain in 2016, this seat was the 9th strongest Remain seat in Britain and the 3rd strongest in Scotland.\u00a0 Labour would dearly love to hold onto this seat to avoid being wiped\u00a0in Scotland and I am sure they will be\u00a0putting a lot of\u00a0effort into the\u00a0campaign.\u00a0 The Survation poll was actually commissioned by the Stop Brexit Alliance which is not surprising given the strength of the Remain vote.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    The predictions of my 5 models are shown in the table below.\u00a0 Currently only my URS+S & URS+T models incorporate parties standing down.\u00a0 The other models show UKIP and Green vote share predictions.\u00a0 The Survation poll is shown at the bottom.\u00a0 Note that this table does not show my normal breakdown of the Leave & Remain votes into the 5 EU Voter Segments I have crea<\/a>ted.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    On the right hand side of the table next to each model’s prediction is a column called Best Fit.\u00a0 This is the sum of the squared differences between the predicted vote shares and the Survation Poll vote shares.\u00a0 If a model makes a perfect prediction then this figure will be zero so a low number is good, a high number is poor.<\/p>\n

    My URS and URS+S models are currently predicting a Conservative Gain.\u00a0 This is because the polls are showing that the Conservatives will make extensive gains in Scotland (up 16%) whilst both Labour (down 9%) and the Nationalists (down 7%)\u00a0will lose votes as shown in Chart R2 below.\u00a0 This\u00a0is the same information as displayed for\u00a0Scotland in chart R1 of my Opinion Poll Tracker<\/a>.\u00a0 Chart\u00a0R3 is the rolling 15 poll\u00a0median for the\u00a0Scottish\u00a0crossbreaks of all the polls.<\/p>\n

    These national changes are what turn Edinburgh South blue with a narrow majority over Labour in what would now be a 3-way marginal seat.\u00a0\u00a0Tactical voting options would exist though\u00a0from the Lib Dem and Green votes and these would be enough to turn the seat back into a narrow Labour Hold as shown by my URS+T forecast.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    I should point out that the table of predicted results is based on the latest polls as of 14th May.\u00a0 The Survation poll took place on 5th April and so my URS forecast (and thus\u00a0my URS+S, URS+T and nURS forecasts) should be based on the Scottish polls at that time.\u00a0 From chart R3, you can see that since early April the Conservatives and Labour have gained around 3% each whilst the SNP has has lost around 5% so the nURS forecast line (non-Uniform Regional Swing) should actually read CON 20, LAB 38, SNP, 31 which is an almost perfect match for the poll.\u00a0 Note that my Brexit Realignment model (EU16R) does not depend directly on the polls, it is my estimate of how the Referendum vote last year will reorder itself at a General Election so this forecast doesn’t change.<\/p>\n

    When I first explored a potential nURS model in Cardiff South & Penarth<\/a>, I was largely concentrating on the Conservative vote.\u00a0 What I noticed there was that there was some polling evidence that the degree to which the Conservative diverges from URS is correlated with the extent the Leave vote diverted from the regional average.\u00a0 \"\"Scotland voted 38% Leave whereas Edinburgh South’s Leave was 16% lower than that.\u00a0 At the same time, the Conservative vote in the Survation poll would have been 10.5% lower than what my URS model would have said at the time.\u00a0 I have added this data point to the scatter plot I created for Cardiff South & Penarth and this is the blue EdiS labelled point.\u00a0 You can see that that the divergences are consistent with what I was observing in Wales and with this extra data point, it now appears that for every 10% the Leave vote diverges from the regional average, the Conservative vote will diverge by 9% from the URS model in the same direction.<\/p>\n

    I should say that the coincidence between the Labour and SNP nURS vote predictions and the Survation poll may be luck but it suggests that my preliminary nURS model is on the right lines.\u00a0 What this does is that the change in the Conservative vote that occurs with nURS is cancelled out by an opposite in the vote share of the party that is the closest challenger.\u00a0 In this seat, it is Labour that benefits from the additional votes and the result was a number close to the Survation poll.<\/p>\n

    At present, I would want more constituency polls before I turn my nURS model into my official forecast.\u00a0 If so, I would add a party standown effect to the model and replace my URS+S with this new nURS+S model.\u00a0 What is clear though is that my preliminary nURS model is forecasting a larger Conservative majority of 181 seats instead of 163 seats from my URS+S model<\/a>.\u00a0 The reason why is that there are far more Leave seats than Remain seats and so seats like Edinburgh South where the Conservatives do\u00a0worse than expected\u00a0are more than cancelled out by Leave seats where the Conservatives do better than expected.\u00a0 This explains my comment at the start of this post whereby a poll that suggests that the Conservatives are doing worse than what is being indicated by national polls is actually good news for the Conservatives.<\/p>\n

    One final point I would like to make is that my preliminary nURS model produces a similar forecast for the Conservative vote as my Brexit Realignment model.\u00a0 I have seen this in a few seats now and it could be that the non-uniform regional swing effect I am seeing is a form of Brexit Realignment.\u00a0 I find it interesting that two very different approaches produce not dissimilar results (my EU16R model predicts a Conservative majority of 203 seats) and this indicates to me that Brexit Realignment is going to be a major feature of the 2017 general election.<\/p>\n

    If you would like to see\u00a0my predicted outcomes for all 632 seats in Britain, please visit my 2017 General Election Forecast page<\/a> and download the spreadsheet at the bottom of the page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    For my first Scottish seat forecast, I head\u00a0up to Labour’s last seat in Scotland.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I have just become aware of a constituency poll in Edinburgh that took place at the beginning of April\u00a0before the election was called but the data has only just been released by Survation. At first sight the poll is bad news for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[21,19,43,16,45],"class_list":{"0":"post-501","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-archive","7":"tag-election-forecasting","8":"tag-elections","9":"tag-general-election-2017","10":"tag-politics","11":"tag-seat-forecast","12":"entry","13":"override"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":521,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions\/521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}