What can today’s polls tell us about next year’s election? Quite a lot actually, but only if read carefully. That’s what we try to do here at Elections Etc, combining the polls with analysis of previous elections to predict what will happen on 7 May 2015. Continue reading Welcome to Elections Etc →

A few people have asked me this question about my forecast. The trends are definitely there as you can see from the graphs below. But since they are well within the very broad prediction intervals, there is a danger of reading too much into them. Certainly we are far from having enough information to say the model isn’t working well for this electoral cycle. Continue reading Why is the 2015 general election forecast trending? →

The Economist magazine have published a great article on the difficulties of predicting the next election. It makes lots of good points well and kindly covers my 2015 general election forecasting model. But I was bemused by the line that reads, “Within months he had published a revised model: polls had not adhered to the original one.” Continue reading Reasons for changing the forecasting model: a response to The Economist →

The graph below shows how my 2015 general election forecast probabilities have changed since October last year.* The blue line shows the probability that the Conservatives will have the largest number of seats. The corresponding red line for Labour is just the mirror image. Also included in the graph is the probability of a hung parliament. Continue reading How the 2015 general election forecast probabilities have changed thus far and why →

Thanks for all the various comments on my initial post about long-range forecasting from historical polls and votes relationship.

Here are some initial responses to comments and questions that have been made on Twitter and on the blog. Continue reading Initial responses to comments so far on the long-range election forecasting post →