UK General Election - May 7th 2015

[YL]

The first 600-proposal was indeed bad for LD, I don't know, how the Tories wanted to come through with it in Parliament. The second version then was - what coincidence! - clearly better for the LDs.

I thought the Lib Dems voted against the new boundaries because Cameron failed to get his fellow Tories to accept House Of Lords reform. 

That was their public reason, and I don't doubt it was part of it, but I suspect the realisation that the new boundaries were likely to be troublesome for them, and for their leader in particular, may have had something to do with it too.

[YL]

The Tories on their lowest ever with ComRes tonight at 27%.

Terrible news for Ed Miliband.

But UKIP at 17 and Greens at 7 isn't believable.

This poll has the combined Lab and Con share on only 60%.  For comparison YouGov this morning made it 72% (and the last six YouGov polls have all had it above 70%) and most other polls (barring a couple of polls in the rather volatile Ashcroft series) have had it at least in the mid-60s.

[YL]

What seats would UKIP possibly win, other than Farage's?

Ashcroft constituency polls (for what they're worth) just showed them ahead in both Thurrock and South Thanet (the latter may be Farage's) and only just behind in Great Yarmouth and Camborne & Redruth.  Various other seats near the East and South Coasts seem like at least outside chances for them as well: Boston & Skegness, Sittingbourne & Sheppey, maybe North Thanet, possibly a couple on the Sussex coast.  I'd also mention Castle Point, mainly because it seems like a rather UKIP sort of place.  Of seats currently held by Labour, I'd think the one in most danger of going purple is Great Grimsby, but Survation and Ashcroft polls there have both shown Labour well ahead.

Using the data published by Electoral Calculus as to how similar the new proposed seat was to the old, I came up with the following alternative General Election 2010

Conservatives 296 seats
Labour 234 seats
Liberal Democrats 47 seats
Democratic Unionists 6 seats
Scottish Nationalists 6 seats
Sinn Fein 6 seats
SDLP 2 seats
Plaid Cymru 1 seat
Alliance 1 seat
Northern Ireland Independents 1 seat

What seat(s) would the Sinn Fein gain from the DUP? And do you really think that Naomi Long can hold on in E. Belfast, and are these figures counting two tory wins in NI, I only count 16 NI seats won by NI Parties?

This is based on the proposed boundaries from the cancelled boundary review, and it's for 2010.  Northern Ireland would have had 16 seats, so that's right, and Alliance would definitely have won Belfast South-East (and had a good chance at holding on to it in 2015; it was a bit of a dream scenario for them).  I'm not sure how he's getting 6 Sinn Féin seats, though: they'd presumably have won the new "Glenshane" seat (the successor to East Londonderry) but Mid Ulster would have been abolished, so I'm only seeing 5.  Possibly he thinks they'd have won North Belfast, but I don't think the proposals would have helped them there.

[YL]

I will just say this again:

Re Rotherham, remember that Labour still got more than twice as many votes as UKIP in the November 2012 by-election, in spite of the problems with the council, the Labour selection farce and the circumstances of the by-election.

[YL]

That's a Survation marginals poll carried out on behalf of Unite.

I must admit that I don't particularly like marginals polls as a concept, especially ones like this which lump together Labour and Lib Dem targets, which are completely different sorts of seats.

[YL]

Looks like bad news for anyone living in South Thanet who doesn't want a circus:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/08/nigel-farage-ukip-south-thanet-election-parliament

[YL]

You'd think that if UKIP were looking for help to win Boston & Skegness, Simmonds' reason for quitting would be the sort of thing they would be looking for.

[YL]

Junk poll in Southampton Itchen, or is something odd going on locally?

Ashcroft suggests it's students being at home.

I thought his quip about Southampton academics being in Tuscany or Cuba was a very Tory thing to say...

[YL]

Another forecasting site, possibly trying to be more of a British 538 than the others: http://electionforecast.co.uk/

Their headline forecast appears to be Lab 307, Con 286, LD 25, SNP 8, Plaid 3, Green 1.

They also have a map giving individual seat predictions, based on a model using "raw polling data" (I think this means Ashcroft constituency polls and YouGov crossbreaks as well as headline figures, so I doubt Al will think much of it) rather than simply UNS.  This shows the Lib Dems pretty much being wiped out in their defences against Labour, up to and including Leeds NW, and not doing that well against the Tories either.  I was a bit surprised to see Argyll & Bute blue, but there are four possible winners there and it could be won on a very low vote share.

[YL]

Another forecasting site, possibly trying to be more of a British 538 than the others: http://electionforecast.co.uk/

Their headline forecast appears to be Lab 307, Con 286, LD 25, SNP 8, Plaid 3, Green 1.

They also have a map giving individual seat predictions, based on a model using "raw polling data" (I think this means Ashcroft constituency polls and YouGov crossbreaks as well as headline figures, so I doubt Al will think much of it) rather than simply UNS.  This shows the Lib Dems pretty much being wiped out in their defences against Labour, up to and including Leeds NW, and not doing that well against the Tories either.  I was a bit surprised to see Argyll & Bute blue, but there are four possible winners there and it could be won on a very low vote share.

argyll seems to have changes to SNP since you posted that

Yes, and Leeds NW and Cambridge (but not Bristol W) have gone back to the Lib Dems.

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That needs a big swing; it wouldn't surprise me that much if it happened but a model like this is only going to predict it if it is predicting a near total Lib Dem wipeout.

Anyway, it's going to be hard to emulate 538 in the UK.  Nate Silver's methodology is dependent on state polls; constituency polls in the UK are fairly rare, only done by a handful of pollsters (any model depending on them is going to be very dependent on Ashcroft at the moment), and don't have a particularly good reputation.  (I think Al exaggerates, but certainly there is a history of some bad ones.  I assume the basic problem is that it's relatively easy to get a dodgy sample.)

[YL]

Trying to 'project' seat results from poll internals (!!!!) is only marginally less stupid than trying to project from local election results.

I may have maligned them there, as they don't fully describe their data and what they're doing with it.  Reading it again, I think they've got some sort of constituency breakdown of lots of YouGov polls and have then fed that into a 538-style statistical model, which would be problematic for the same reason.  But I may have misunderstood.

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You mean the "UKIP are going to win Rotherham" sort of analysis?

[YL]

In stunningly surprising and earth-shattering news, a certain blond Old Etonian is applying for the Tory nomination for Uxbridge & South Ruislip.

[YL]

Sky News are reporting that they have seen an internal UKIP target list of 12 seats:

South Thanet
North Thanet
Sittingbourne & Sheppey
Worthing East & Shoreham
Eastleigh
Portsmouth South
Aylesbury
Forest of Dean
Thurrock
Great Yarmouth
Boston & Skegness
Great Grimsby

[YL]

Rhondda in 2001 remains the funniest instance to date, I think.

Labour 23,230 votes (68% -7% on 1997)
Plaid Cymru 7,183 votes (21% +8% on 1997)
Conservatives 1,557 votes (5% +1% on 1997)
Liberal Democrats 1,525 votes (4% -2% on 1997)
Independent 507 votes (1%)
Labour HOLD with a majority of 16,047 votes (47%) on a swing of 7% from Lab to Plaid

Am I missing something here, because that doesn't sound funny at all?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhondda_%28Assembly_constituency%29#Elections_in_the_1990s

Also, why did Plaid win Rhondda anyway?

Oh, you mean Rhondda 1999 not Rhondda 2001.

No, he means that people were predicting that Plaid would win Rhondda in 2001 because of the 1999 results and were hilariously inaccurate.  Possibly these people were the same ones who were predicting that Charles Kennedy would lose his seat at that election because of some poll internals which suggested the Lib Dems were doing badly in Scotland.

[YL]

Does the election forecast's website map have a higher resolution? I want to see their projection in London.

They now have tables of projected vote shares and winning probabilities according to their model for every constituency.

http://electionforecast.co.uk/tables/predicted_vote_by_seat.html
http://electionforecast.co.uk/tables/predicted_probability_by_seat.html

Somewhat surprisingly, the seat they give the second highest probability of a UKIP gain for (after Clacton, where they're using the Ashcroft by-election poll's general election question in their model) is Oldham East & Saddleworth.

In a way I'm quite pleased someone is trying something like this, but I'm not very convinced yet.  We'll see how it develops.

[YL]

Still, I don't think Plaid Cymru or the SNP will run in Buckingham, so these figures look bizarre.

Re Plaid, note also Devizes and Sheffield Hallam.  Something needs tweaking in their model I think...

[YL]

The Lib Dems have selected David Rendel, MP for Newbury from 1993 (when he won the seat from the Tories with a massive majority in a by-election) to 2005, and a contender for the party leadership in 1999, to defend their narrow majority in Somerton & Frome.

[YL]

Remember when people were talking earlier this thread about Bercow's seat? Well, it looks like UKIP are standing again in Buckingham.

For people outside the UK, Bercow is disliked by a lot of people. Some of it is from the Tory right, who think he is a turncoat (he often flirted with defecting as a backbencher) and can't "control" his wife (ew) ; but he has been involved with both the expenses scandal (his formidable dolphin-suited challenger in 2010 was named "Flipper" in homage to his second-home "flipping") and a current kerfuffle about the installation of the Commons Clerk, which he has well and truly bungled.

Anyway, he's unpopular; UKIP will probably be his only real challenger (no dolphins next year, I guess). Probably a Speaker hold- a defeated Speaker is, as far as I know, unprecedented -but you never know. I can't imagine many Tories will rush in to defend Bercow anyway.

Bercow was once very much part of the Tory right: when he was a student he was secretary of the "Immigration and Repatriation Committee" of the Monday Club.  He was already unpopular with his own party when he was elected Speaker; supposedly he got very little support from other Tories and was largely elected on Labour and Lib Dem votes.  (It was a secret ballot, so we don't know for sure what happened.)

I don't think Buckingham (basically a prosperous rural area with no coastline) fits the UKIP profile very well.  They did have some success in the county council elections in Buckinghamshire, presumably helped by the HS2 issue, but it was mostly further south, in the Aylesbury constituency (which UKIP carried, and is on that reported target list).

[YL]

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson selected as Tory candidate for Uxbridge & South Ruislip.

[YL]

There may still be nearly eight months to polling day, but I saw my first garden poster (a Labour one).

[YL]

Labour won a majority of seats in England in 2005.

Yep Tony Blair was the Labour Party's Heineken... reaching the parts other Labour leaders failed to reach

Blair had lost most of his popularity by 2005, though.  Had the Tories found a leader who didn't have the baggage from the 1990s that Howard had and was a bit more competent than IDS, Labour might even have lost their majority.

[YL]

Survation constituency polls:

Boston & Skegness: UKIP 46 Con 26 Lab 21 LD 2
North Thanet: Con 33 UKIP 32 Lab 24 LD 6
Rotherham: Lab 48 UKIP 37 Con 6 LD 4

[YL]

The various broadcasters who would be involved have come up with some proposals for TV debates.  The suggestion is three debates, one Cameron/Miliband, one Cameron/Miliband/Clegg and one Cameron/Miliband/Clegg/Farage.

The Lib Dems aren't happy with being left out of one of the three, and Cameron appears sceptical, so whether any debates will happen and who'll be involved in them is still up in the air.  Of course the Greens, Plaid and the SNP are not impressed either.

[YL]

More post-Clacton/Heywood polls:

ICM/Guardian Lab 35 Con 31 UKIP 14 Lib Dem 11
Populus Online Lab 36 Con 35 UKIP 13 Lib Dem 9
Ashcroft Lab 32 Con 28 UKIP 19 Lib Dem 8

Nothing quite as horrible as the Survation poll there, though the Ashcroft poll is good for UKIP.  The Guardian are writing the ICM one up as a UKIP surge and it's true that the figure is quite high for them by ICM's standards, but they are comparing it with a poll which showed an unusually low figure for them.  (The Guardian's reporting of its polls is pretty awful IMO.)

[YL]

Why is Cameron trying to avoid including the Greens in the debates? I have to imagine that giving the Greens such a high-profile soapbox could only lead to a net loss in voters for Labour.

He isn't.  His statement said he thought the Greens should be in.