One of the most puzzling elections in the Western world are the elections for the National Assembly in France. They were called three years before they needed to be held and have resulted in a messy gridlocked

When the results came in, Professor Rawlings caused huge controversy with his projected national vote: Labour 35% Tories 26% LibDems 16% Others (Independents, Greens, Reform) 22% This pointed to a Hung

We've now had the manifestos of all the parties standing in the election. We've also had one head-to-head debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer on ITV, an interview session with both on Sky where

MRP stands for Multilevel Regression and Post-Stratification. What they do is first do a standard poll with a large sample - at least 10,000 people rather than 2,000. They ask for voting intention, and

Rishi Sunak's surprise decision to call a general election campaign - and it really took everyone by surprise - was overshadowed by his announcement of it in the pouring rain, with Steve Bray (of "Stop

Some described Natalie Elphicke's defection to Labour as the equivalent of a Corbynista like Zarah Sultana joining the Tories. In many ways it's worse. Whatever people think of Zarah Sultana's political

The other pollsters missed quite badly. For example, here are the final opinion polls for the London Mayor elections, compared to the actual result: source Look how wildly out YouGov were in predicting

He's been charged with embezzling SNP funds, while he was party leader. It's not yet clear how much Nicola Sturgeon knew and whether she'll be charged too. The big question is, how does this affect the

Unlike opinion polls, council by-elections show us what people who actually show up to vote are thinking. There have been 168 council by-elections since the Local Elections in May 2023. Here are the aggregate

YouGov has been persistently showing low scores for Tories and high scores for Reform. This might be to do with sampling issues - instead of a random sample of people, they polll people signed up to their

There's been a lot of re-writing of history about the 1997 general election, mainly by people who were small children at the time, or who were born afterwards. They look at the GDP stats and note that

Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party has been working really hard to move the opinion polling dial. Since November 2023, National Insurance has been cut by 4% (at a total cost of £20bn) and businesses were

The Republic of Ireland has just had a referendum to amend their constitution. There were two amendments proposed. One was to change references to "marriage" and replace it with "durable

I don't mean the winner George Galloway, I mean the man who came second, independent candidate Dave Tully. Tully owns a car repair business in Rochdale, and only decided to stand as a candidate in the

So - we had shenanigans in Parliament last Wednesday. The SNP had an "Opposition Day". What does that mean? Well, the elected government controls the parliamentary schedule, in order to get it's

Rochdale's Member of Parliament, the Labour MP Sir Tony Lloyd recently passed away and a by-election to replace him will be held on 29th Feb. The whole thing has turned into a complete circus. The Reform

Rishi Sunak has made the EU climb down further; they've agreed that Northern Ireland can freely participate in all trade deals the UK does with the rest of the world. I suspect what persuaded the EU was

Here is the polling graph: source Obviously there are ups and downs due to events - you can clearly see the dips due to partygate and Truss in the graph. But the downward trend starts in April 2021 and

In the 1993 Canadian Federal Election, the ruling Canadian Conservative party went from 156 seats to just 2 seats. With opinion polls looking dire for UK Tories, some pundits are excitedly predicting the

The Conservatives, with the help of their Australian advisor Issac Levido, believe campaigns do make a difference. They're taking inspiration from Scott Morrison's unexpected victory in the 2019 Australian