Our Clacton and Islington North Projections Have Been Revised After Constituency Polling

Following the release of constituency polling carried out by Survation we have incorporated the findings into our database and created exceptions for Clacton and Islington North that the algorithm will use as a new baseline. Effectively we are now applying changes to the national polling rolling average to the results of the local surveys. This effectively means the national trend is now mapped onto the snapshot captured by the Survation local fieldwork with tweaks for the timing of the polling.

Will this work-around improve our overall forecast? Well it is the only credible data we have that makes allowances for the wildcards (see this article for a discussion of our algorithm's problems with local exceptions).

We still arguably have other problematic projections in relation to Faiza Shaheen, George Galloway and Lee Anderson at the very least. There are also seats where candidates have been disowned by their party or where we suspect that there will not be a result in line with national trends. Reform's Richard Tice in Boston & Skegness will likely do better than the third place projection the algorithm currently gives him. We are looking at using MRP polling to re-base constituencies with special circumstances. However even MRP is not reliable at single constituency levels - see some some examples of inconsistencies here.

We are today (June 26) projecting, with all the caveats above, that Nigel Farage will take Clacton and the Labour Party's official candidate in Islington North will defeat the former leader of the Labour Party and previous sitting MP, Jeremy Corbyn.

If any more single seat polls are conducted we will seek to incorporate their results into the database going forward. We are experimenting with modeling MRP based predictions from British Polling Council members for some of the other problematic seats. As ever we welcome feedback.