Looks Like The Labour Supporters Have Forgotten This Site....

[ToraToraTora]

http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/homepage.html
quoted by a certain ABer almost daily a year ago, it seems to have fallen out of favour, can't imagine why.

[ichkeria]

I think I can suggest a reason: it was a load of b*ll*cks :-)

[ichkeria]

...plus we're several years away from the next general election. Added to which the current Labour leadership plainly doesn't care about opinion polls, they only seem bothered about how great many die hard Labour folk think they are. The Tories assume they are a shoo-in, so why should they care, and the Lib Dems and UKIP daren't look :-)

[ToraToraTora]

"I think I can suggest a reason: it was a load of b*ll*cks :-) " - yes but it gave them hope!

[retrocop]

and who lived by it and got much egg on face as a result.?

[jim360]

It was mainly Mikey, although I was paying a fair amount of attention to it too.

As it happens, ickieria's being more than a little harsh to call the site "a load of "b*ll*cks", and TTT appears to be demonstrating his usual nuanced understanding of political science. In the first place, electoralcalculus is not a polling organisation. Instead it took the outputs of opinion polls published by other organisations and fed those numbers into a model to produce predictions based on individual constituency results. Problem is that the polls turned out to be off by far enough to make the model sophistication largely irrelevant: "Garbage in, garbage out", which is a common enough phrase in computer programming. The model used by the site was tested after the election using the actual results and came up with a new 'prediction' that was correct in predicting the seat results for 624/650 seats, with 21 of the wrongly-predicted seats having majorities of less than 5%. Given TTT's favourite comment about our current system, that percentages do not equal seats, getting such a large proportion of the constituency results correct based on national percentages suggests quite a decent model, actually. The problem electoralcalculus, and everyone else, faced was that the polling was so badly wrong, but that wasn't really in their hands.

[mikey4444]

There was nobody more surprised about the result of the Election than Dave Cameron !

The site may have got the partition between Labour and the Tories wrong but it was bang on the button regarding the SNP, LibDems and UKIP, especially the latter.

The reason that they and other Pollsters got it so wrong was that they seriously underestimated the number of people that were ashamed to admit that they really supported the Tories.

[naomi24]

Oh, Mikey. You're still at it! How funny!

Actually, I think there was someone more surprised than David Cameron. You. :o)

[Sqad]

I am a bit confused here, is the site link mentioned in the OP, the same site that mikey quoted regularly in the past 4 years...Electoral College Seats or some such name?

If so, then i do not know if it was b.llo..s or not.......I could never understand it.

mikey just quoted the conclusions on a regular basis which was perfectly reasonable.

However, my main concern would have been and indeed was, why Labour had blown a 14point lead over a period of 5 years whilst the Tory/Lib Dem alliance was apparently making a mess of the country.

Shouldn't we try and keep Politics simple?

[ichkeria]

I was being more than a little tongue in cheek with the 'b*ll*cks' description, especially as for me the polls were probably not that inaccurate in giving a current picture, just or very good at predicting voting on the day as plainly a lot of people either had not made up their minds or changed them.
But it is not had to see why no one is paying much attention to polls just now

[mikey4444]

Its worth while remembering that ALL polls got the main result wrong, even Lord Ashcrofts private Polls for the Tory Party.