Do the Tories do best if more people are voting?

The chart above shows the actual number of votes cast for all parties from 1979 to 2005 and also the total of votes not cast (the paler blue line) from within the overall electorate each year.

For 2010 I have assumed the current state of the polls CON 40%: LAN 28%: LD 19%: OTH 13% (at 75% turnout). Two shapes leap out:

This suggests that the long-term key electoral strategy for the Conservatives must include a big element of getting the vote out, engaging the electorate’s wishes and keeping the political centre right happy. Maybe the UK is an essentially conservative country – but one which struggles from time to time with the Conservative party! The Tories are not fighting Labour or the Liberal Democrats but apathy.

For the political left it suggests that Labour and the Liberal Democrats feed off each other’s votes and that their success strategies should focus heavily on competing to attract each other’s voters. The trends suggest it is as if this fight is independent of the Tory fight against DNV. Maybe this is something of a long running civil war within the political left – and therefore more based on leftwing ideology and less on addressing what the non-voters actually want (as that may not jive with the ideology). If true, it might explain the falling trend.

No wonder Cameron is love bombing the LibDems – every vote they get eats into Labour alone and increases his chances of getting a majority.

Note that the Tory absolute vote result is intimately connected to turnout – equal to turnout in % divided by 3 and then minus 11.5 million (essentially the Con + DNV trend line) to within 2% for every year apart from 1997. 1997 was thus the only election year out of 8 in which the ‘Left’ (Lab + LibDems) takes votes (in absolute numbers terms) away from the ‘Right’ (Tory + DNV) – well done Tony Blair. DNV has a core vote of about 10 million and it seems as if pretty much ALL ‘returning’ votes at higher levels of turnout go to the Tories.

Also noteworthy is that the total vote of the ‘Left’ is a lot less than the total vote of the ‘Right’. DNV has been much the largest political party for over a decade and correctly understanding and influencing their desires and behaviour is the key determinant for the outcome of general elections.

Polls would be much more useful if they also stated an assumption of turnout, as the DNV element is clearly a core driver of results and polls and turnout are not independent events. Models for predicting election results in terms of seats won should use both poll data and turnout assumptions.

I think the 2010 general election is going to have a big turnout – and that will result in a big Conservative victory.

Patrick is a regular poster on PB – this is his first guest slot.

Brighton Pavilion Poll:
CON 27% (+4)
LAB 25% (-13)
LD 11% (-5)
GRN 35% (+14)

Is it about who is best placed to impede the Tories?

I’ve now got the full dataset from the ICM poll of the Brighton Pavillion constituency which suggests that the party could win its first ever Westminster MP at the general election – the headline figures, with comparisons on the 2005 general election in the seat.

But it’s the detail of the poll that could have CCHQ worried. For this shows even in a current Labour-held seat a great readiness by those who supported Blair’s party in 2005 to switch and use their vote in a way that might most hinder the Tories.

Thus while only 52% of 2005 Labour voters are sticking with the party 27% say they are voting Green. This is even more acute with the Lib Dems where 29% of the 2005 voters now plan to vote for the Green candidate, the party leader, Caroline Lucas. It’s these big movements which are behind the headline figures.

What the mere fact of having the poll is likely to do is to reinforce further the Green’s position as the party that can stop the Tories thus encouraging more tactical switching – hence the reason why the Green party commissioned it and are making it public.

The dynamic shown here is probably good news for the Lib Dems in three-way marginals. If they can show that they are best placed to stop the Tories then you can see a lot of Labour switching – even in seats currently held by Brown’s party.

It should be noted that the sample size was just 533 which with all the other calculations comes out at about 5%.

I’ve just got another £100 bet on, this time at 6/4, with Victor Chandler that the Greens will win a seat at the general election. It looks good to me.

Mike Smithson

Iain Dale’s end of year elections:-
Pollster of the Year
1. YouGov
2. Angus Reid
3. ICM

How could they support an untested firm?

I’m sure that my friends at PB’s pollster, Angus Reid, won’t be too upset to learn that I did not vote for them as “pollster of the year” in Iain Dale’s annual elections. The Vancouver-based firm only started publishing UK voting intention surveys in October and clearly have yet to go through the process of having their findings tested against real results in an actual election here.

The only test that we’ve had during 2009 was the Euro elections on June 4th when both YouGov and Populus came pretty close in the battle for top pollster. My vote went to one of these two.

Although AR has a big international reputation it is new to the UK and its methodology challenges some British polling orthodoxies. A major area is the way it operates it past vote weighting formula. ICM, Comres and Populus don’t weight to the actual result of the last election but a notional one designed to deal with the problem of “false recall”.

For some reason more people say they remember voting Labour than actually did so and the pollsters weight to a notional 2005 outcome that usually has Labour about six points ahead against the actual margin of 2.9%.

Not so Angus Reid. It weights to the actual 2005 result – and this is one of the main reasons why it usually reports smaller shares for Brown’s party than the other firms.

Are they right? Who knows at this stage – but this is how the AR approach did at the last Canadian elections just over a year ago.

The UK of course, is different, but I was hellish impressed by this table when the arrangement between PB and Angus Reid was being set up.

Mike Smithson

Doctor Soup Flickr

Are your end year bets as bad as mine?

December 31st is generally an important day for political punters because so many bets are linked to the end of the year. And for me, New Year’s Eve 2009 looks set to be one of the worst ever. In fact I don’t have a winner but I have a lot of losers.

It’s generally quite instructive to look through your losing bets to pick up ideas that might contain losses in the future.

So this thread header is both instructive to me and a bit painful. For here are my December 31st losers :-

“Will Baroness Scotland remain in her position until the end of 2009?” – a reasonably-sized bet staked on September 22nd when things looked a bit doubtful. She’s still there.

“Will Alistair Darling cease to be Chancellor in 2009?”. Two chunky bets staked on April 24th and June 7th at 9/2 and 3/1. That looked like a winner until the Chancellor refused to give up his job to Ed Balls in the June re-shuffle because Brown was in such a weak position. Balls had even gone as far as saying farewell to what he thought was going to be his old department. Darling is still there.

“Ed Balls to be Chancellor on 31/12/09″. A nice sized bet staked at 16/1 on January 5th 2009. Ed didn’t make it.

“Gordon Brown To Leave PM Office in 2009.” A big bet placed in May 30th at 5/2. Brown is still there.

“Peter Mandelson (200/1); Jacqui Smith (200/1); Alistair Darling (50/1); Jack Straw (40/1); Harriet Harman (25/1) to be PM on 31/12/09″ mostly modest bets staked in January 2009. None of them made it.

“David Blunkett (100/1), John Reid (100/1) and John Denham (33/1) to be home secretary on 31/12/09. Smallish bets staked in January 2009. None of them made it.

Looking back at them they all seemed reasonable punts at the time and I don’t regret any of them. And lest you feel sorry for me the total losses represented above were made up many times over by my 9/4 on Jacqui Smith going in 2009, 6/1 on Fred Goodwin paying part of his pension back in 2009 and the 5/1 that Tony McNulty would be ordered to pay part of his housing expenses back in 2009.

And there was, of course, in November the 50/1 that Cathy Ashton would get the EU foreign affairs job (Thank you MORUS for the great tip)

Mike Smithson