Our Tactical Voting Model Adds 13 Seats to Liberal Democrat Total
We have overlaid on the standard uniform national swing model a tactical voting adjustment. In seats where the Tories are projected to win this gives a 3 point boost at the expense of the third placed party to the second placed party. The 3 point boost is our guestimate of the general effectiveness of tactical voting in the past. This may well be an underestimate if voters have made more use of online tactical voting websites.
The preadjusted figures based on a classical uniform national swing model were as below:
The difference in the projections has the Tories losing 18 more seats as a result of tactical voting, 5 going to Labour and 13 going to the Liberal Democrats.
Most of the pollsters MRP models are projecting much higher gains for Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Some are even predicting double digit results for Reform. So we are something of an outlier using the tried and tested though nowadays less trusted uniform national swing (UNS) model. If tonight's outcome is very much different to our prediction we will have to conclude that UNS no longer works in a four party First Past the Post voting environment. This has been an interesting intellectual exercise - though this last month has been intense in terms of fixing anomalies - the snap calling of the election caught us on the hop.
With regard to the individual seat predictions almost a 100 seats are in "Too Close To Call" territory with less than 3% differentials between parties.
Enjoy the excitement of the counts and our post-mortems can wait for next week!
