WeThink
Yesterday we looked at how well, or rather how badly, we did with the difficult to predict "wildcard" seat micro-forecasts we made for the general election last month. Today we will look at how all the pollsters did in comparison with their macro-forecasts. It is fair to say
projections
It is now a month after the election and after a break from the frenzy that was, it seems like a good time to reflect on how we did and what we learnt. This is the first of two posts and we are going to get the bad news out
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
Algorithm
A month ago we identified five wildcard candidates - Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn, Faiza Shaheen, Lee Anderson and George Galloway - where applying the uniform national swing didn't make sense because of the particular local circumstances. The model generated obviously nonsensical results for these candidates in their constituencies
Focaldata
It will probably be worth all the polling companies who conduct MRP (all listed helpfully here by Peter Ingelsby) coming together to do a post mortem after the event to diagnose the cause of the large spread / range of forecasts. This is separate, but related to the range of vote
Survation
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
The Multilevel Regression with Post-stratification (MRP) model is nowadays seen as the gold standard method in modern political forecasting. It typically uses large national samples, analysing data on a constituency-by-constituency basis, the MRP poll predicts specific electoral seat outcomes, indicating which candidates are likely to win or lose. It can
Expert Panel
This week's Expert Panel Survey want's your view.
Survation’s constituency poll in Clacton carried out last week shows Nigel Farage is on course to win the seat on an unprecedented 43.5% swing from the Conservatives to Reform. Clacton was the only seat won by UKIP in the 2015 General Election, returning Tory defector Douglas Carswell on
Expert Panel
Last week we ran our first survey of visitors to the UK Polling Report site, who we are calling our ‘expert panel’ because by virtue of you being here, you obviously take more interest than most in the detail of the polls. 307 of you answered between June 7 &
JL Partners
As expected, the first poll that indicates that Reform is ahead of the Conservatives came last week, with YouGov placing Reform one point ahead of the Tories. Scarlett Maguire, Director of JL Partners, says 'It is an outlier, however, and the majority of polls, including ours, continue to place
Algorithm
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
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