Wild Cards: Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn, Faiza Shaheen, Lee Anderson and George Galloway
On X/Twitter the fans of Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and Lee Anderson get very agitated about the Polling Report algorithm's forecasts. Some of the complaints are of the "What kind of poll is this nonsense?" kind. Well it is a projection, not a poll, based on current national polling trends applied to the past performance of the parties in their respective seats.
This means there are anomalies, Jeremy Corbyn's projection in Islington North is based on the performance of an independent who ran against Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. This is obviously nonsensical, on that we are in agreement with our critics. So what should we do? We are not aware of any independent constituency polling on which to base a forecast. We could fudge the figures to give a more realistic projection by giving independent Jeremy a base on which to apply the algorithm. What would be the base figure, how much of a personal following does he hold with voters after decades as their local MP? 10%? 20%? 30%? We simply don't know and have no objective basis on which to work.
Similarly Lee Anderson in Ashfield is now standing for Reform. His projection is based on Reform's past performance. Do we give him an incumbency bonus? How much? His detractors argue that he is actually tainted and has no local following. It is very difficult to see what objective rule we could apply to his circumstances. In Chingford will Faiza Shaheen split the Labour vote and see Iain Duncan Smith squeeze back in? We can't really rationally use past election results to determine these specific wildcard factors.
Reform Party leader Nigel Farage is possibly better known than even the two main party leaders, yet the Polling Report algorithm expects him to come a distant third in Clacton. Again we suspect, that might be a teensy bit wrong, that it might be a little unfair given his high profile. How do we project Rochdale, a usually ultra-safe seat for Labour where George Galloway won when the Labour Party suspended its own candidate and Gaza is a real local issue for many voters? Obviously the past performance is no guide. Labour should do better, though George Galloway is a wiley politician with the advantage of incumbency. Our current thinking is that if a credible constituency poll is published we would consider using that as a basis for making a projection - though that effectively puts the projection at the mercy of the pollster's accuracy in very difficult to do single seat polling. There is no easy solution for wild card forecasts.
We have been caught on the hop by the snap election and are solving problems whilst our algo-bot tweets out projections - inevitably annoying people. We will try to deal with these wild card edge cases over the next few weeks.
