New tech or traditional expertise: who will get the local elections right?
Welcome to the 211th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), a polling newsletter that always welcomes new readers. So please don’t keep TWIP secret; please share it with your friends and colleagues:
This time I take a look at the different predictions made for the English local elections and what they may reveal about different approaches to forecasting.
This is followed by a summary of the latest national voting intention polls, seat projections from MRPs and the most recent party leader ratings.
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An excellent explainer of the polling landscape from Jane Green;
What the latest polling of Labour Party members reveals; and
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A quick update on my raised eyebrows four editions ago at The Independent over its reporting of an opinion poll. Good news! The story has now been corrected.
And with that, on with the show.
A varied field of local election predictions
On 10 February 1996 world chess champion Garry Kasparov sat down to face an unusual challenger: IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing computer. The first of what would end up being 12 games between the two, half in 1996 and then the other half in a 1997 rematch, marked a symbolic moment in the rise of computers. Kasparov lost the first game to the computer Nor was this a fluke. While the computer ended up losing the first set of six games 4-2, it then won the rematch 3½–2½. That rematch win for Deep Blue was the first match under normal chess tournament conditions to be won by a computer against a reigning world chess champion.
Given the symbolism of the moment and the world celebrity status of Kasparov, there is a rich range of stories to tell about the contest, including the question of whether the IBM side cheated, the bug in the code that spooked Kasparov into thinking the computer was even better than it really was, and the way chess computers have changed the way humans play chess.
It was also just one of a sequence of ‘highly talented human versus technology’ contests over the years including the heavily-mythologised claims of American railway worker John Henry outpacing a steam drill in digging a railroad tunnel.
In a rather more prosaic way, we have our own version of that coming up in the English local council elections in a few days’ time.
Before we get to that, here are the latest predictions at the time of writing for changes in seat numbers:
The live version of this table, which will be updated with any further data before Thursday, and is also easier to zoom in on, is here.
UPDATE: There have indeed been updates to the figures since this was published, so please use the link to the live table for the latest predictions.
Although the broad picture across all the predictions is similar, we have a wide range of numbers for net seat gains/losses for each party, and those come from a variety of different predictive approaches. (I’m omitting the predictions that are simply for vote share in councils for the reasons discussed last week, though how they perform will certainly be of interest too.)
That spread of approaches mirrors the split between Kasparov and Deep Blue, but with fewer pawns and more potholes. We have both traditional human expertise and high-tech innovation.
In the Deep Blue corner we have two new entrants to local council election predictions: Bombe and Kronaxis. Both have figures which are outliers. Note in particular how relatively well Bombe has the Conservatives doing, and both are outliers on the Lib Dems. Bombe uses “pioneering machine learning technology” while Kronaxis uses “a synthetic-panel system” with “representative voter panels from a 65,000-persona simulated UK electorate”, that is, they use AI to model voters.
Over in the Garry Kasparov corner, we have several different approaches and so, taking this analogy past breaking point, I’ll group them under the names of different chess world champions.
Sam Freedman, the political commentator, and Robert Hayward, the Conservative peer, are the psephological José Raúl Capablancas. Their predictions rely on deep local knowledge, political experience and expert judgement. Although they attach numbers to their conclusions, they are the most qualitative in their approach.
Then we have the Anatoly Karpov of the group, with methodical, detailed, quantitative methods: Stephen Fisher, a professor at Oxford University and one of the brains behind the general election exit poll. He has been producing his statistical predictions for several years and they are based on extrapolation from national data. They have been widely quoted in other high quality news sources, such as the Financial Times.
Of a similar ilk, with detailed statistical approaches too, though not yet quite with Stephen’s establishment status, are the Mikhail Botvinniks of this analogy: Ben Walker of Britain Elects/New Statesman, and a pair who are both new to the prediction field this year. They are Hannah Bunting of The Elections Centre at the University of Exeter and also PollCheck. All three use detailed local government election datasets in their statistical models. Unlike Fisher/Karpov with his national data approach, individual ward figures feature heavily in this trio’s calculations.
In nearly the same category, making them the Tigran Petrosian of this field, is More in Common. As its model draws partly on the firm’s own polling data, I have placed More in Common in a category of its own, although the mix of polling and statistical knowledge is similar in many ways to the Botvinniks and Karpov.
I should also say that many of those above have kindly answered queries or provided information, in several cases over many years. So I hope no-one dislikes their chess playing alter ego too much… and I hope the proper chess players among my readers aren’t about to bombard me with too many improvements to my analogies.
I’ll return to all the predictions, possibly with less chess, after we have the local election results in and can see who did best, who did worst and whether the high-tech newcomers have this time upended the established prediction landscape.
Note: the Kronaxis numbers are the latest from their website taken on 2 May. But I’m waiting to hear back on a query as it looks to me there may be an error that has crept into what is published. I’ll update the live table if their numbers are further updated.
Scotland and Wales
The elections for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd are both important, electing national governments with significant powers. There is, though, less to say about election predictions for them as the story in each case is a relatively consistent and simple one. But the elections deserve a mention nonetheless.
In Scotland, the SNP look likely to come out on top, with the main question being whether they do well enough for a majority on their own, and Reform are in a tussle with Labour over who finishes second (a long way behind the SNP). Ballot Box Scotland has a good round-up of the state of play in more detail, including for the other parties.
In Wales, the race for first place is looking much closer, here between Plaid and Reform. However, Plaid is much more likely than Reform to be in the strongest position to put together a government drawing on support, or at least acquiescence, from others, even if Plaid finish a little behind Reform. Labour is set to decline dramatically from Welsh political dominance into third place. PollCheck has a handy round-up of the polling for this contest.
The Liberal Democrats
I have written a piece about the Liberal Democrat prospects over on my other newsletter, Lib Dem Newswire.
Elsewhere from me…
Oh Capita. Familiar to Private Eye readers for decades under another name for its repeated major public sector contract disasters, Capita nonetheless keeps winning new contracts from the government.
What is going on?
An anonymous tip about US misdeeds in Greenland
That was the premise for the episode of the Danish TV drama Borgen which Cory and I discuss on the latest episode of our podcast, Political Fictions:
As well as listening here, you can also listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or in your favourite podcast app.
Cory also is a proper chess player and kindly gave some advice on my choice of chess champions above. He’s also written this preview of the Birmingham local elections:
Cory tells me that his Birmingham predictive style is very much of the Capablanca model but executed nowhere near as effectively. That is also a good summation of his actual chess style.
If you spot a factual error…
Borrowing an idea from Stuart Ritchie and others, if you spot a factual error in an edition of this newsletter, I will give you a free 12-month subscription to the paid-for version (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual errors qualify; grammatical errors or disagreements over interpretation do not and my decision is final. Messages about both of those are always welcome, though.
Voting intention and leadership ratings
Here are the latest voting intention polls from different pollsters. We are in something of a limbo period as the trends in the current polls, such as Reform and the Greens slipping, may or may not be turned around by the fallout from next week’s election results.
The table is also online here, along with explanations about what is included. It is updated regularly through the week with new polls.
Next, the seat projections from MRPs and similar models, also sorted by fieldwork dates. Note that only two of these date from this year.
Finally, a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by pollster name. Again, the previous negative trends for both Farage and Polanski are still there in the data but we will have to see what next week’s results do to that.
The table is also online here with additional details and is updated regularly through the week as new data comes out.
For the historic figures on both voting intention and leader approval, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch up on the previous two editions
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