Seats for votes
As I plan my career in political spread betting I've been looking up some electoral facts and figures. This site is a fascinating mine of data, and also has a useful table (see 'Battlemap') for calculating how many seats each party gets from various votes. If (say) each party gets 35% then Labour get 362 seats, the Tories 210. This is very similar to IG Index's spread, which suggests punters are basically following the opinion polls, which is another reason to be bullish Labour.The usual caveats to this analysis apply. A relatively unimportant one (in my view) is that it is based on a uniform swing. For this analysis to be wrong the Tories want a bigger swing in Labour/Tory marginals than elsewhere, which will mean they get more seats for their votes. Is this likely? Obviously there are things the Tories can do to help this, such as effective and well targeted campaigning. Furthermore if Labour have lost popularity because Blair is no longer as popular then that might mean former Tories who were attracted to him might switch over -- and these types should be more prevalent in Lab/Tory marginals.
A more important one is it keeps the Lib Dem's share of the vote at a constant 15%. I would expect them to do much better than that.
posted by Matthew @ 6/30/2003 04:06:00 PM
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