Tim Shipman, Political Editor of the Sunday Times, tweets:
BREAKING: First big election model seat projection predicts Tory majority of 48
Con 349
Lab 213
LD 14
SNP 49
Plaid 5
Green 1
Speaker 1
Datapraxis ran 270,000 YouGov interviews through their own predictive MRP model (like the ones that predicted the last election) 10:00 PM · Nov 23, 2019
There have been no less than four other voting intention polls published tonight, from Savanta ComRes, Deltapoll, BMG and Opinium.
These four polls showed Tory leads over Labour of 10, 13, 13 and 19 per cent respectively. The average of the four gives a slight increase in the Conservative lead. Meanwhile Lib Dem hopes were getting bounced up and down: Deltapoll showed them up 5, but the other three were down a little or steady.
But the big news was the MRP – Multilevel regression with poststratification – poll. In the previous election YouGov’s MRP poll was one of only two (alongside a conventional poll by Survation) that did well. This one is slightly different, in that YouGov’s data has been used, but the MRP model is not their own but that of an outfit called Datapraxis.
Polls do not foretell the future. Things could still change. They did in 2017. But this is a blow to Labour’s hopes.
This same poll might not be so great for the personal hopes of some Conservative MPs. A subsequent tweet from Tim Shipman adds,
The Datapraxis MRP modelling predicts that 7 big beast Brexiteers are in danger of losing their seats.
Read the whole tweet to find out which MPs they are. Number 6 will worry you.
349 – (650/2) = 24, not 48. But it is only a projection from a poll. And it is the Sunday Times, for Goodness sake!
What is interesting is that none of the polling data, including this set, suggests any possibility of a Great Realignment. The tribes are returning home.
This in turn raises the question of how important really is Brexit to the average punter? Where are you now, famous 17 Million?
Well, the Labour manifesto is so completely and utterly batshit crazy that It makes sense to many people to vote Tory just to keep the buggers out.
Let me hang my head in shame and admit my mistake. The equation for a Parliamentary majority is of course:
349 – (650 – 349) = 48
This is further evidence of the ancient wisdom that one should do the arithmetic first, and then have the beer.
But even beer-besotted arithmetic can remind us of something: a majority of 48 is substantial and should permit the Conservatives to deliver Boris’s BRINO, even allowing for some Tory backsliders. However, fall only 24 MPs short of the prediction, and that majority vanishes.
As Prof. Reynolds at Instapundit often reminds us — Don’t get cocky!
In the past I would have spoken confidently of shy Tories and even more of shy Brexitters. The Brexitref was going to lose. Hillary was 98.2% certain to win. I could make a good argument that this still applies. I could also make a counter-argument: precisely because these things have happened, Tories and Brexitters are less shy. And I could make a counter-argument to that counter-argument: precisely because they were shocked they did not win, the PC silencers have become more vicious and so reasons for shyness have returned.
In an election, unlike in a referendum, the effect has consequence. In any seat a Brexitter could win, they will need a strategy for providing evidence of that fact.
It is notoriously hard to replace a party in the anglosphere. The party you are trying to replace must give you a lot of help. You’d have though Labour were doing that, but you’d have thought the same in the 80s, yet the LibDems, helped by their own quarrels, failed to put Labour away.
Niall does a sterling job of describing the convolutions which may impact polling data. But sometimes the simplest observation can be most revealing — as with the old astrophysical observation that the sky gets dark at night, and therefore the Universe cannot be infinitely old, infinitely large, and uniform.
About 17 Million voted Leave in the Referendum — a number significantly larger than the +/-13 Million who voted Labour or Tory in the last election. If those 17 Million were a cohesive group focused primarily on Brexit, then this election would have had the foregone conclusion of a Brexit Party victory. The clear implication of the current polls is that Brexit is not the only (or even the main) issue on the minds of the majority of UK voters.
Perhaps a single-issue referendum can give a misleading impression of the relative importance to the citizenry of that particular topic?
The figures don’t include the 3 Deputies to the Speaker, most likely 2 Conservatives, one of whom should be Chairman of ways and Means and Conservaitve, and the other Labour, all of,whom (should) avoid voting on party lines. We have to assume that Speaker and 3 Deputies are neutral to the balance between Government and Oppostion.
Also, the working assumption is that Sinn Fein MPs win seats then abstain, so for a majority it is ([650 – 4 Speakers etc. – Sinn Fein)]/2, rounded up or + 1 if needed.
Go re-elect Trump Longmuir and play yourself on your side of the pond.
The two are not really comparable.
The Brexitref was a straight majority vote: it made sense to compute the probability of Brexit on nationwide polling.
The 2016 US election was decided in swing states — and nobody could say for sure what states were swinging.
Mr. Ed — That is a good point about the Speaker and his deputies. Of course, non-partisan behavior by a Tory Speaker and 2 Tory deputies would reduce the effective predicted Conservative voting block from 349 to 346.
If we assume that Sinn Fein gets 7 MPs who decline to take their seats, that would make the magic number for a majority 320, (650-4-7)/2. If Sinn Fein saw an opportunity for leverage in a close Parliament and took their seats, then the magic number would become 323. If the total of Tory MPs falls 23-26 short of the predicted 349 …
Just for scale, Tory MPs at the General Election in 2017 were 318; in 2015 330; in 2010 306; in 2005 198.
The other issue is the objectives of the elected Tory MPs. Given the astonishing success of the UK Establishment in making Mr. Farage pull back, it is a reasonable guess that a significant number of the Tory MPs will be pushing for the most watered-down BRINO they can deliver, rather than an Exksian hard Brexit. Given what we know about Boris, he would be happy to oblige.
“If those 17 Million were a cohesive group focused primarily on Brexit, then this election would have had the foregone conclusion of a Brexit Party victory. The clear implication of the current polls is that Brexit is not the only (or even the main) issue on the minds of the majority of UK voters.”
The issue here is the definition of ‘Brexit’ you assume. Many around here consider only the ‘No Deal’ Brexit to be a real Brexit; that Boris’s deal is a sell-out/surrender. But a lot of the 17 million are perfectly happy to be leaving the EU with a deal, and as far as they’re concerned, voting for Boris gets them exactly what they wanted.
‘Leave’ was effectively a coalition of lots of different views, and the hardliner ‘No Compromise’ bit of that coalition a tiny, tiny minority. I think there are about 2-3% still not satisfied and voting for the Brexit Party. Everyone else is with Boris.
How is it that a huge Conservative poll lead translates to such a small majority?
“How is it that a huge Conservative poll lead translates to such a small majority?”
Because the majority is measured against the *total* of all the other parties, not each of them individually.
Boris has about 40-45% of the votes. That he can get a majority at all is therefore remarkable.
It also depends how the numbers pan out in each constituency. If you had three constituencies with votes cast 51-49, 51-49, 0-100, then the polling would report 102 votes for the first party and 198 votes for the second party. The second party has a near two-to-one lead in the polls, but loses the election two seats to one.
First-past-the-post voting emphasises the influence of marginals, and commonly turns pluralities into majorities. Proportional representation tends to lead to unstable coalitions and (lovely phrase) ‘hung Parliaments’. The goal there is decisive government over representative government.
Gavin Longmuir (24th November 2019 at 5:06 pm), The Times (a remainer paper that has been pretty remoaner at ‘times’) today reports the LibDems are telling their canvassers to stop mentioning the ‘revoke article 50′ policy “because it is proving so unpopular on the doorstep”. If The Times’ information was only that the policy bored voters who wanted to hear about other stuff, I think they would have used that less-brexit-flattering formulation.
Nullius in Verba (25th November 2019 at 6:01 pm) is closer to it, but it is not just about the strength of Brexit motivation as such. Those people (commenters on this blog, for example 🙂 ) who study Brexit deals in detail see things to concern them. Many more are just a keen on Brexit, indeed less aware of such honest remainer downsides as offset a bit of the upside, and simply know that Boris was the prime public face of VoteLeave – ergo Vote Boris = Vote Leave (and that is even before they consider the practical dangers of voting Brexit in a seat where even-split majority Tory and Brexit vote would hand the seat to Labour). Some of this is about many people having better things to do (in their eyes, but I see where they are coming from) than read long dry leaving-agreement proposal documents in detail.
Of course, “A little learning is a dangerous thing” – or can be. Unless the polls tell him The Brexit Party is about to eat his lunch (AFAICS they do not today), Boris has no reason to deny the deal he got – and then halted on timescale grounds – during the election campaign. Whether and how far he would parley a strong majority into a renegotiation in the month before leaving is anyone’s guess. As Dominic Cummings put it in a throw-away aside,
At the moment, it looks like, in every sense, we’ll see.
Niall K: “Unless the polls tell him The Brexit Party is about to eat his lunch …”
The Brexit Party became irrelevant when the Man of Steel, Mr. Farage, crumbled and turned his Party into the Tories’ Mini-Me. There is no rational reason for anyone now to vote for The Brexit Party, except as a scream of despair.
The interesting question is — Why did Mr. Farage fold? The likely explanation is that the UK Establishment successfully twisted his arm — and presumably will also twist the arms of elected Conservative MPs in the new Parliament to get the BRINO they can live with.
However, we will have to wait a few decades until books are written giving the inside story on why Mr. Farage threw in the towel. By then, the EU will have collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, and future Brits will wonder what all the fuss was about Brexit. And then those future Brits will get back to worrying about their main issue — the NHS.
“The interesting question is — Why did Mr. Farage fold? The likely explanation is that the UK Establishment successfully twisted his arm”
Almost certainly it was his own party and grassroots supporters who twisted his arm.
The polling is such that Nigel isn’t going to win, and likely isn’t even going to get any MPs. There’s no point in voting for him on the grounds that he can get elected and implement No Deal. You simply don’t have the numbers for that.
So the only options on the table are that Boris gets a majority, in which case you leave the EU with Boris’s deal, or there’s a hung Parliament or worse, in which case a Remainer coalition can force through all sorts of conditions like a second referendum with a ‘Remain’ option on the ballot, which has a fair chance of cancelling it entirely. (This time they’ll cheat even harder.)
What can Nigel standing achieve? All it can do is split the Leave vote, and reduce the chances of Boris getting a majority, putting Brexit at risk. Plus extending the period we’re stuck in the EU by another year.
So suppose Nigel *threatens* to stand, and thus risk blowing Brexit up, unless Boris promises to renegotiate or No Deal? But given the above considerations that’s an obvious bluff, and Boris would undoubtedly call him on it. Boris’s strategy has been to make sure the blame for all the delay and opposition has fallen on others, so even if Nigel did, Boris wouldn’t mind because he could blame it all on Nigel. Even making the threat would hand Boris a political stick to hit him with in the campaign. The answer would undoubtedly be “We don’t believe you” and the threat would be ignored.
Boris got a deal, and can get Brexit done by January. That’s what he’s offering the country, to get people to vote for him. Throwing his most valuable asset away makes no electoral sense. With a deal, he can probably even tempt some lukewarm Remainers across to his side, since the deal means minimal disruption to existing trade with Europe, and guarantees on a lot of stuff they like. Also, even with a working majority, he still has to get it past Parliament, and he’s still unlikely to have the votes to pass No Deal. He’s also got the party backers to deal with. The Conservatives are funded by big business, who want a deal. And as the polls showed, even most of the supporters of the Brexit Party wanted a deal.
So I think it’s pretty obvious why Nigel caved. I guess you can’t blame him for trying it, but it was always going to be a long shot, and after the last few months Boris has a very well-developed and robust strategy worked out.
Fundamentally, it comes down to democracy. Boris has the people’s support for his deal. The No Deal position doesn’t. And that’s all there is to it.
NIV — Agreed — hard core Brexiteers were always a very small minority who mis-interpreted the results of the Referendum as widespread support for their position.
Disagree about Mr. Farage, though. The obvious course of action was for the Brexit Party to assess each constituency on its own merits. If the incumbent was a strong Leave supporter, the Brexit Party should have thrown its local support behind that person regardless of his Party affiliation. If the incumbent was Wet or a Remainer, the Brexit Party should have contested the seat — whether the incumbent was Labour or Tory.
By becoming a mere Conservative running dog, the Brexit Party destroyed most of its potential support in Labour areas.
A big mistake that Brexiteers have made since the beginning is thinking that they have won and the battle is over. The take-away lesson for the world is that the battle is never over. Even with a Tory majority in Westminster, the UK Establishment will still be pushing for the most watered-down BRINO they can achieve.
“If the incumbent was a strong Leave supporter, the Brexit Party should have thrown its local support behind that person regardless of his Party affiliation. If the incumbent was Wet or a Remainer, the Brexit Party should have contested the seat — whether the incumbent was Labour or Tory.”
It also depends on what the opponent’s position on Brexit is, and whether the local Leave supporters also support the incumbent or not. For example, if the Tory is a Leaver, Labour a Remainer, but the Leavers in the district are all die-hard Labour, then a Brexit candidate would split off more Labour voters than Tory. It’s quite a complicated calculation in each district, and given the uncertainty of poll predictions, a potentially dangerous game to play.
In any case, Dominic Cummings claims to have looked at the numbers, and says there are no seats where that applies. (The Conservatives supposedly purged their Remainers, anyway.) I’ve not checked, so take that with a pinch of salt. But Cummings seems to be more Brexiteer than Tory, he spent quite a lot of time arguing with Tory priorities during the Leave campaign, and I think it’s quite possible he’s right.
“A big mistake that Brexiteers have made since the beginning is thinking that they have won and the battle is over.”
They *have* won. Most Brexiteers support Boris’s deal, as the collapse of Brexit Party polling demonstrates.
It’s not perfect, and it’s not everything they could have dreamed of, but no deal ever is. It’s like any contract – you have to give up stuff the other side wants to get stuff that you want. In an employment contract, you have to work so many hours a day in order to get a salary. Nobody wants to have to work. But getting a job where you’re paid is still a victory. Trying to hold out for an employment contract where you’re paid but don’t have to do any work for it is unrealistic. And to expect the EU to agree to any deal without getting the stuff *they* need out of it is unrealistic too.
The USA are the same. They wanted to trade with the EU. They negotiated a trade deal, just as we will have to. And they didn’t get everything they wanted either. That’s life.
I agree with Nullius, that it was not the establishment twisting his arm that prompted Nigel’s decision. If the establishment knew how to twist Nigel’s arm, they’d not have waited till now.
I still think it would have been wise to contest May’s seat, and just one or two others where very-leaver-obnoxious Tory combined with ‘only Tory or Brexit party can win here’, but it was Nigel’s choice. The Brexit Party always looked likely to replace the Tories if May stayed in power, likely to be the populist choice if any front-runner but Boris replaced her, and having to keep out of the Tories’ way if Boris became leader. Strategically, going after Labour in seats the Tories can’t win became the only game in town after Boris won – I am only criticising tactics.
A point to remember is that Nigel has one of those qualities we vainly hope for in our leaders. He simply doesn’t want it as much as the average politician. This became obvious in 2015, when he briefly resigned, and again in 2016 when he clearly felt he could leave the field of battle with honour. (This was one of the few moments when Gavin’s oft-repeated claims that post-referendum Brexitters were living in a fool’s paradise has a bit of content – though even then, while Nigel should have waited to supervise choosing the new leader, the post-Nigel farce of UKIP leadership may have been honestly unforeseeable and even improbable.)