UK General Election - May 7th 2015 (The Official Election Day & Results Thread)

[Diouf]

So generally John Curtice suggest that the polls were not much wrong, perhaps expect a slightly better Conservative performance, but that the seat predictors have done a poor job. The Lib Dems and Labour in Scotland have lost by far more in their strongest constituencies than  the seat predictors expected, and therefore will have lost some seats by enormeous swings.

[Diouf]

Nate Silver writes that 292 - 305 seats for the Conservatives and 240 - 263 seats for Labour would be within the 90 percent confidence interval of both the exit poll and of their forecast.


Liveblog here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/liveblogs/uk-general-election-2015/

[Diouf]

If the exit poll is right - and it's a massive if - every pollster in the country is going to have a lot of explaining to do.

What I want is some actual marginal results...

Have any of the channels showed what the ca % would be with this exit poll?
John Curtice suggested that the Lib Dems would still get around 8%, UKIP looks like they will at least pile up many votes in unwinnable constituencies which should mean a % around 14-15. Perhaps the Con lead is only around a 3-4 % lead which quite some polls have shown

It really could be the seat prediction models that would have the biggest mistakes if the exit poll is right.

[Diouf]

So question now whether the Conservatives can just about sneak a tiny majority or will be a few seats short

[Diouf]

If UKIP manages not to implode over the leadership election and ends up with a decent leader, then they could have some good years ahead in terms of adding to their seat total. There could again be defections from the Eurosceptic right wing of the Conservative party and there will be an EU-referendum where they will be the only significant party which will campaign in unison for leaving the EU. Perhaps they could get a (smaller version) of the SNP effect by uniting many of the voters at one side of the referendum question. It might not last all the way to the next general election due to the lack of focus on EU in general elections and because it will likely be a few years after, but in many months before and after the referendum, they could very well pick up a number of seats in by-elections.

[Diouf]

And a 47-32 lead for proportional representation over FPTP. There obviously won't be much chance of a change happening now with a Tory majority, but positively surprised by that. It suggests that in the future, it might not be completely impossible, especially if the reform camp is led by Someone Who Is Not Nick Clegg. Now that UKIP is those hurt the most by the system, then perhaps the old voters, who would actually turn up for such a referendum, would be less opposed. The poll shows that 60+ voters prefer PR by 48 to 36. The FPTP would of course grow doing a referendum campaign with the easy message of "chaos, chaos, chaos" with PR, but if the numbers are like that now it looks good. Labour might also be less opposed to PR now that they don't have the Scotland seats anymore which made FPTP even more favourable for them.

[Diouf]

Something that needs to be asked is: Has FPTP ever had a more epic failure? 1983 is nothing in comparison to this.

One of the least proportional outcomes in UK history. Around the same level as 1983 and 1931

[Diouf]

Something that needs to be asked is: Has FPTP ever had a more epic failure? 1983 is nothing in comparison to this.

One of the least proportional outcomes in UK history. Around the same level as 1983 and 1931

How is your proportionality score calculated?

"To calculate the proportionality of election outcomes, we use a standard measure that takes the absolute difference between seat and vote shares for each party, sums them, divides by two, and then subtracts the resulting number from 100."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/05/06/what-would-britain-look-like-under-proportional-representation/

The article is from before the election, but the figure is an update posted on twitter by one of the academics after the election.