I have has a look at one such issue in Redcar. This is the seat that contains the Corus factory that was mothballed in January 2010, costing around 1,700 jobs in the local area. Although the government can not be held directly responsible for this closure, they are going to feel some anger towards them.

This creates a pocket of feeling that is local in not necessarily felt nation wide. This results in the UNS not picking up the feeling in this area and mis-calling the seats and swings there.

Also, due to the local feelings about this plant closure and the fact that people travel more to go to work, this feeling might be felt in neighbouring seats from Redcar itself. All of this feeling is lost on the UNS and when trying to project a seat total view using it; this kind of local issue simply doesn’t show up.

This is why I’m even more interesting in the method created by us @ tmg, as this looks at local per seat feelings and this information is projected up to a seat projection and then to the national share of the vote instead of the other way around.

If you look at this table, I have shown the swing that occured in Redcar, the swing of the bordering seats and the seats that border those:

(click for full view)

As you see the swing that was recorded in Redcar is way above the regional or national swing that occurred on the day of the election and the swings recorded in all the bordering seats and the ones bordering those (bar one) were also beyond the regional & national swing that occurred.

Now it’s true that the tmg seat by seat model didn’t call Redcar correctly at the time of the election, however looking at the figures, it had it down as a seat as threat from the Lib Dems (with a very close win chance percentage between the two parties), so it was showing that this was a seat in danger for Labour. What would the UNS have shown? A safe Labour hold. The tmg seat predictor did show that Stockton South would fall to the Tories, the UNS would have put it to a marginal Labour hold.

Now this happened within a bunch of pretty safe Labour seats so even though many swings were large, they weren’t large enough to take too many safe seats from them. Imagine is this feeling / situation was replicated in South Manchester or around Edgbaston. Here you would see these kind of swing make a large difference in a seat by seat v UNS projection.

So what can I conclude? UNS should be dead or dying. Instead a more intelligent approach to polling needs to be looked into; certainly with the possible end of 2 party politics. We need to look at seat information and not national views to try and create a bigger & clearer picture of the nation. This might sound expensive, however looking at the first attempt to achieve just that by us @ tmg, it should be clear that it’s actually not expensive and indeed within our grasp. The tmg model wasn’t prefect, partly since time didn’t allow any fine tuning, however it should show that a seat by seat approach is actually the way forward and the UNS should be put to pasture as it doesn’t really tell us anything any more.

Now we have a government (well kind off) and I’m back from the Caribbean; I thought it was about time to write something about the tmg election tool.

Here are the basic details of the tool:

• The system used crowd sourcing of information instead of the class polling method to collect the feel of the next election
• The methods used resulted in over 3 Million pieces of information being collected over the month of ‘polling’
• The system would check the expected outcome of each seat (though various sources) and ranked each of the standing parties into a win percentage chance matrix
• Each time a new data collection occurred, the new win percentage was ranked against the last win percentage
• The change to the previous to the current win percentage was calculated and then projected forwards to the election date -this is like a horse closing in on the rails in a horse race; so you a calculating if the current leader is going to be overtaken before the finishing line
• A hybrid seat predictor was also created, this applied the classic polls over the seat prediction to add a drag factor to the crowd sourced information to see what the difference were
• The system also took the seat prediction and turned that into a national vote share (which ended up following the classic polls rather well)

Observations:

• The system initially showed a Tory victory however, over the month the number of seats they were expected to win dropped to below the 326 mark
• The second option for the Tories to join up with the DUP (with their 7 or 8 seats expected) also started to fall away
• This resulted in the fact that the Tories were likely to either form a minority government or do a pact with another party -Namely the Lib Dems (called on the 28th April on this blog)
• The system showed that a Lib/Lab pact would not work as their combined total would also be short of 326 seats (called on the 28th April on this blog)
• The system, at the time of doing the ‘final call’ and ‘seat by seat call’ was done too early as there was a shift away from the Tories in the final evening before the polls opened. This put the Tories on 315 instead of 321 (with the Hybrid poll going from 317 seats to 310 seats)
• The ‘web’ (and the classic polls) clearly overplayed the Lib Dem success of the leader debates. The seat predictor had the Lib Dems getting 55 seats before the debate, where is shot up to 83 seats by the ‘final call’. Here we can see people getting over excited about something different. It shows that the leader debates didn’t actually have that much of an effect on the result and it was only the Twitter and media types that were wowed by it all. This lead to the Lib Dem call being too high and the resulting Labour vote being too low (either this or the comments on the illegal immigration amnesty scared off a lot of Lib Dem votes right at the end of the campaign -as some commentators have noted)

Conclusion:

• All in all the seat predictor should be considered a success. It predicted results like the Greens getting Brighton Pavilion when people thought this was clearly wrong. It also predicted some unexpected Tory gains where the old media was saying it wasn’t possible.
• The predictor can pick up local issues in a seat, which the national polls can’t -this is an advantage of the old media polls
• The predictor was right to not include votes in Northern Ireland as the political landscape there is too different to the rest of the UK (for example with the DUP losing Belfast East with a 23% swing away from them)
• Both the old media polls and the seat predictor (and social media along with the web in general) reacted too strongly to Nick Clegg’s leaders debate performance. Therefore you can say that the seat predictor got that wrong; however so did everyone else (with news papers polling the Lib Dem’s and Labour getting about the same percentage share of votes)
• As a result the number of Labour seats was too low and the number of Lib Dem seats too high
• At midnight before the election the Tory seat number was 315, and the hybrid was 310 -this was closer than ANY UNS projection from the old media polls
• The data collected shows the feel of the election over the month, so this information could be linked to the news to see what each party did right and wrong on a day to day basis
• The seat predictor can work in a multi party system; the polls and the UNS only really works in a 2 party system -therefore it is more progressive than the old media methods. If more elections end up having a strong third party, the UNS will only show it’s weakness once again

Therefore the tmg seat predictor was closer to any UNS swing from polls published in the papers and in other media outlets with only the exit poll (which is post election so doesn’t count) being closer to the actual result. The tmg seat predictor didn’t cost the volumes of money spent by parties and papers to collect information (which wasn’t as correct anyway). So this method is both cheaper and more accurate than the polls.

(click for full size)

It wasn’t 100% correct (annoyingly), however at midnight (the final call and seat by seat call was at 4pm on the eve of the election, due to trying to rush out the seat by seat results with still being able to go to bed) the results calculated was the most accurate call of the election result; beating all the polls, all the papers, all the TV news. It also lead to the conclusion that the Tories would either try and form a minority government or join with the Lib Dems, as well as highlighting that a Lib/Lab pact would not collectively reach the magical number of 326.

(click for full size)

Therefore I would call it a success!!

Roll on the next election… maybe in October?

To be honest I don’t know if I’ll be right or wrong; however it think it’s worth trying to show something a little different than the Uniform National Swing model in trying to judge an election.

I’m off to the West Indies on Friday (possibly before the result is fully know); clearly a huge planning mistake. I’ll either want to be back in the UK to take the claim, or be happy to be outside the country as it’s all wrong.

Only time will tell….

my analysis and seat by seat breakdown.

With a degree of luck the names of the 3 party leaders are not too generic and they don’t share their name with someone equally or more famous (So it’s handy that Gordon Brown doesn’t use his actual first name of James else this wouldn’t work).

Here is a graph of the google keyword searching from 3rd to the 25th April and the results are quite interesting.

Click for full size

Firstly you can clearly see the increase in searching on the leaders of the two main parties on the 6th April when the election was called and you see that Nick Clegg is well down on the main parties as far as interest.

This remains pretty constant until the first leaders debate when many people that probably don’t watch things like PMQs suddenly hear this new voice from a party that simply doesn’t get talked about in the press (other than to laugh at them). Nick Clegg blew everyone away and that evening and the next couple of days everyone wanted to know about him so hit Google hard.

Between the debates Nick Clegg remains the top searched leader instead of the least searched. This is possibly due to the fact that the papers, certainly the Conversative supporting ones, dedicated front cover after front cover to this person and this party that they normally wouldn’t even mention.

Fast forward to the second debate and the same effect can clearly be seem. This show that people have started to realise that his first performance wasn’t just the ‘unknown man’ doing well, but someone that people would like to know more about and see what he might be able to offer them. The debates had let the ‘there are actually 3 major parties’ cat out of the bag.

The debates have been enjoyable and are certainly something I hope remain in future general elections, however the big winner was clearly the Lib Dems and not the Torys (as they would have hoped when they were pushing so hard for them). Giving Nick Clegg an equal footing to the other two main parties made people realise that there was actually 3 major party choices (excluding national parties in Wales, Scotland and NI). Many people that don’t pay attention to the Westminster circus might have not known anything about the Lib Dems, other than jokes that were made about them. Maybe people realised that a protest vote against the larger parties is best served collectively instead of distributed over many fringe parties.

Most of all since the first leadership debate over 800,000 young people registered to vote. Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems have managed to strike a cord with many people, but this is most strong with first time and younger voters. The ‘Old parties’ and ‘Old politics’ message has really worked.

This surge of the Lib Dems has clearly messed up Labour and Tory plans for the election and the polls are now so confusing that most of the country now has no idea who is going to win. This, however, is not bad news but brilliant news. People are starting to care about how they are governed once again. Listen to people being interviewed and before the leaders debates many thought the government was not reliant to them and if they voted or not didn’t really matter. Now people are excited and many will be voting for the first time. I don’t really care who people vote for but you should hold onto that right to vote with pride. You can’t moan about your council or the government if you didn’t even bother adding your voice to the collection who ended up picking it.

]]> http://www.anton.co.uk/blog/index.php/searching-out-for-nick-clegg/feed 0 http://www.anton.co.uk/blog/index.php/does-everyone-agree-with-nick http://www.anton.co.uk/blog/index.php/does-everyone-agree-with-nick#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:43:23 +0000 Anton http://www.anton.co.uk/blog/?p=202 Tomorrow is the third and final leadership debate in the run up to the General Election on 6th May, the topic will be on the economy. In many respect this is one of the few areas where the three main parties have different views and plans to tackle the monkey on the UK’s back -the national debt.

From continuing along a steady path and increasing National Insurance to speeding up the governmental spending reduction programme and keeping National Insurance as is; there are choices. It will certainly be interesting.

The one thing I wanted to look at this evening was the projected number of seats expected to be won by the Conservative party from the tmg seat projector.

At the start of the campaign the Tory’s were looking like returning the slim but clear majority. It should be said though that that this was the starting point of the social and crowd sourcing experiment and therefore this was a guessed starting point from various betting and social systems; based loosely on vote share polls.

Before the first debate the number of seats started to hover just below the ‘win line’ but within the expected 8 extra votes from the DUP, it wasn’t really a major issue for them in reality.

Then the first debate; the nation discovered that the Lib Dem’s weren’t just the strange party in the corner of the Houses of Parliament or the actually discovered them for the first time. Nick Clegg works the room and the camera and people took notice. The number of projected seats for the Tory’s continued to drop, with both Labour and the Lib Dems taking seats from their total. The papers talked talking about a third party and more people started to pay attention.

The number of seats continued to drop as the trending methodology of the seat projector caught up with this new mood of the nation and by mid April the Tory’s had reached 9 short of a majority. At this point even the DUP would only help create an minority government.

The second debate had less on an effect, but confirmed that the ‘Clegg effect’ was going to remain until after the election and the polls moved to a point where you wouldn’t know who would be first, second and third from day to day.

Move to the eve of this final debate and the Tory vote is falling ever further back, the Labour vote is dropping off, but the Lib Dem vote seems to be bigger, stronger and secure. The many seats that the Tory’s were expecting to win off the Lib Dems in the South West and South East now start to look out of their reach.

Tory projected seats (click for full size)

Therefore the Tory’s have only a few things to hold on to:

• Win the final debate by such a large margin that their support returns
• Hope that Nick Clegg doesn’t perform well or that this surge of Lib Dem support will dissipate before the 6th May
• Abandon some of the Lib Dem targets instead look of previously ‘off the radar’ Labour seats
• Hope that every projection and every poll is wrong in a ’1992 might happen again’ moment of blind faith

Personally I think that beyond a massive mood swing (and something larger than bigot-gate), this election is heading the Tory’s having the highest number of seats but too far away from the win line. However it also looks like the combined number of seats for Labour and the Lib Dems will also be shy of the win line. What happens next becomes any-one’s guess. Can we see a Tory / Lib Dem pack? I’m not sure; I think the Tory’s will be too close to the win line to give up cabinet positions and change the voting system for those Lib Dem seats that will push them well over the win line. Instead we might see a minority government for short period of time, though this would create many extra dangers.

Labour would get a new leader, the next budget will make the whole country feel sad and angry. You might even get public sector strikes and general unrest due to the ‘tough choices’ required. This might lead to the minority government falling early and not getting back in again; whoever governs isn’t going to be popular for at least a couple of years. Due to this we might even get another election before summer is even over.

Crazy times.

Rule one is politics is make sure your mic is off if you are going to lay into the general public; seemingly a member of the public that was lined up to talk to you as well.

Gordon must now know it’s over, the press and the Internet will be all over this like a rash.

Gordon looks a little worried

Transcript:

GB: That was a disaster.

Aide: Why what did she say?

GB: Well just… They should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?

Aide: I don’t know I didn’t see her

GB: That’s Sue I think. It’s just ridiculous

Aide: They’re pictures … I’m not sure they’ll go with that one will they?

GB: They will go with it

Aide: What did she say?

GB: Oh everything. She was just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour …. ridiculous.

So how long do you expect the party machine to start a smear campaign against this woman? 10 minutes, 20 minutes. They need a Malcolm Tucker and quickly. Mandy is going to be soooooooooo angry.

This, in general, has received less press than the seat predictor and indeed seemed to makea little less sense. The figures used to be in the same zone as each of the polls produced each day, however after the first leadership debate it went way off. Now both of these predictors are experimental and we were thinking that we would just have to put this going well off the classic polls down to experience; however the latest MORI poll has made us think again.

The vote predictor works slightly differently than the classic poll predictor as it redistributes votes for ‘other’ in seats where the smaller party has no chance of winning. Therefore parties like the BNP and UKIP in places where they stand no chance are moved over to the expected winning party to create a truer picture of the nation current view. This is also the case for a vote for Labour in a seat like Richmond Park. In reality this vote predictor is asking the question ‘Who do you think will win where you live’ instead of ‘Who are you going to vote for personally’.

This means that votes for the SNP, PC and indeed the greens show up on the vote predictor as it is taking into account the ‘first past the post’ system we have in the UK. For ease the votes in Northern Ireland are grouped into the ‘other column’; also in this column are smaller parties that are expected to win a seat (for example wyre forest).

So with this information, we expected that each of the main parties will be a little higher than the polls, but creating a slightly purer feeling of the nation and this indeed was the case with the polls and our predictor being within the normal margin of error of the classic polls.

This was until the first leadership debate when the classic polls went a little bit mental. Nick Clegg’s performance really spooked the polls and they started thrashing around with no real idea what might be the result from day to day.

Click on image for full screen view

We started to conclude that the vote share tool didn’t work as a concept. However the it did start to move the Tory’s down and the Lib Dem’s up in the expected vote share.

Since the vote share predictor works on trends instead of an instant snapshot, we didn’t expect it to be get too excited, but it started to look nothing like the polls being produced -that was until today.

It would seem that the polls are now calming down; though i’m only saying this since the polls are now, once again, within the margin of error of the tmg vote predictor. This is good news for the concept I have created, but raises a few questions about the classic polls.

Although the classic method of polls is fine, the crazy movements that were seen from the 16th – 25th April only seemed to confuse the picture instead of clarify it. During the poll madness the tmg method of vote share prediction remained calm though still seemingly reflected the view of the nation. Now the polls are starting to show similar results once again so the tmg method seems to have been validated.

The tmg method had Lib Dems started on 19% and are now on 26% & the Tory’s were on 42% and are now on 37%, which at least feels about right.

Therefore, as it currently stands, I think the tmg vote predictor is something worth looking into more as it seems to be correctly following the feel of the nation; though without thrashing around when something unexpected occurs -unless people are actually after the sensational stories generated from unstable polling results

Firstly, are the stories of the dangers of a coalition government true in any way? I’m too young to remember the last coalition government but many are treating the prospect with fear.

Secondly, with the figures currently projected how would a coalition be set up? We currently have the projected seats of Con – 314, Lab – 221, Lib – 82, Others – 33.

Therefore if the expected Lib/Lab pack is created this would give a total of 303. Not only is this still less than the projected total for the Tory party, but it’s also way short of an overall majority.

Now I can’t see the SNP, PC, Greens and all the NI parties grouping together to create a super coalition to keep the Torys out so what happens next?

If the Lib Dems do have a go at forming a government with Labour, would they then try to form something with the Torys? I can’t really see that being accepted. I would expect the DUP (with 8 projected seats) joining the Torys. They would make a total of 322, so just slightly short. Would this be enough to form a minority government or would be simply have to roll the dice again?

It’s going to be exciting, if not a little confusing.