2015 Election Prediction

My prediction is that because this looks like the toughest election in the UK to predict in my lifetime, any predictions that are made will tend to reveal what the prognosticator in question wants to happen.

The US general election of 2000 is what I base this on, where Bush and Gore were "too close to call" for most of the year leading up to it and most liberal pundits predicted a narrow Gore win and most conservatives a narrow Bush victory. 

I'm inclined to go for a small Conservative majority based on the notion that 6 weeks of exposure to Ed Miliband will make the electorate realise they cannot risk putting him in charge of the country.

However I might be demonstrating the bias that I refer to by that prediction- there is certainly enough polling evidence to sustain any prediction from a solid majority for either Conservatives or Labour, or a breakthrough by insurgent parties like UKIP, the SNP and perhaps the Green Party- and in any case using one piece of evidence to make a prediction (Miliband's popularity) means I'm probably overlooking other evidence.

So the only safe prediction is that the Liberal Democrats will suffer.

On The Republican Nomination

The Iowa straw poll did it's job of whittling down the field of candidates for the Republican nomination, with only Michelle Bachman, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney & Rick Perry likely to pick up serious numbers of delegates once voting begins in the primary process.

I agree with most mainstream pundits that only Romney and Perry can win the nomination. Both have lovely hair which is a key attribute in a presidential candidate. My preference is Romney because he is a highly effective leader in both government and business- and he can win the votes of moderates and even disgruntled liberals. Also Perry's record of cronyism and lack of concern about executing innocent people are disturbing.

For the last two years Romney's strategy has been to run as the candidate of economic competence for a general election that would be about the dismal record on jobs and growth by the Obama administration. Against the presumed candidates up until now- Huckabee, Palin, Pawlenty, Huntsman, Gingrich etc- he could reasonably claim to be far and away the most plausible man to turn around the US economy.

Rick Perry is the one candidate who Romney cannot play the economy card against with much success for the simple reason that Texas has an incredibly successful economy compared to the rest of the United States. There is a question of how much that has to do with Perry personally or how much he could apply Texan policies to the USA as a whole but politics is partly about being in the right place to take credit for good things that happen. He is also a better campaigner than Romney.

However I am going to predict a Romney win because:

• Bachman will take more votes from Perry.
• Romney is a more attractive candidate outside the South, support for him will be strong in the North East of course but also in the Mormon heavy Western states around Utah and the Mid West where his father was a successful governor.
• He has a campaign network in place from 2008 and will probably out organise Perry.
• The Republicans tend to nominate from the more moderate wing of the party.

It is a much more intriguing campaign than it looked a few months ago when Donald Trump & Herman Cain were the flavours of the month.

Ignorance Is Strength

Something to consider:

The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and news magazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote

......
On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Maybe this says something about the increased specialisation of knowledge, as academics and pundits become ever more informed about the minutiae of their field they lose focus on the broader picture. Also perhaps some fields of 'expertise' are really job creation scams, the article mentions that when asked to predict grades of college students using a simple formula of test scores and high school grades is more accurate than the choices made by 'experts' based on assessments of personality and background, however using test scores and grades doesn't require much in the way of an admissions staff.

Science enables us to predict many things with great certainty but in most other fields the appearance of science is given to areas of study that cannot easily be subjected to scientific rigour, where things cannot be repeated multiple times and can't really be falsified.

Countdown....

... to 10 pm, when the first Labour Ministers turn on Gordon Brown.

Election Prediction

I'm going to make my official election prediction now so people can laugh at how wrong I am.


I suspect that the Labour & Conservative vote is being accurately reflected in the polls however given the relative uncertainty of Lib Dem supporters to vote I believe that their support will be lower than anticipated.


So I am predicting a wafer thin Tory majority rather than a hung parliament and Lib Dem gains to be under 30 seats, with Labour getting around the same as the Lib Dems in the popular vote but still having around 200 seats.

Prediction:

Conservatives*: 35%, 325 seats
Labour: 28%, 195 seats.
Liberal Democrats: 28%, 90 seats

* Includes Ulster Unionists.

Weather Predictions- A Hypothesis

For all the talk of snow bringing the country to a standstill, the actual amount that has settled doesn't seem that much to me, despite the dire warnings from the meteorologists.

Back in 1987 Michael Fish famously dismissed the possibility of heavy storms- right before the heaviest storms in living memory devastated southern England- and has held a degree of notoriety for this erroneous prediction ever since.

No one ever pays a price for an excessively scary prediction, think of the Y2K experts, but failing to spot a problem earns an unwanted place in folk memory. Hence weather forecasters are more likely to overstate the severity of the weather than to understate it.

Will The World End In 2012?

No.

(via Infidel 753)

It's Difficult To Make Predictions, Especially About The Future.

Long range predictions are always fraught with the danger of seeming very silly and not simply with the benefit of hindsight*. However in the New Statesman, George Friedman of Stratfor, has a go at predicting the next 100 years. Much of it is interesting, although much of it seems preposterous.

However two comments relating to Mexico strike me as extraordinary, when they are in the same article:

The US has room to grow and it manages immigration well.

Okay, that's a reasonable belief. Honest people can believe that the level of immigration to the USA is either good or bad. However when the same author writes:

Many areas of northern Mexico that the US seized are now being repopulated by Mexicans moving northward - US citizens, or legal aliens, or illegal aliens. The political border and the cultural border are diverging.Until after the middle of the century, the US will not respond. It will have concerns elsewhere and demographic shifts in the US will place a premium on encouraging Mexican migration northward. It will be after the mid-century systemic war that the new reality will emerge. Mexico will be a prosperous, powerful nation with a substantial part of its population living in the American south-west, in territory that Mexicans regard as their own

It seems inconsistent to say the least. If the second prediction were a remotely plausible outcome then the USA's current management of immigration is catastrophic. One of the measures of success when considering immigration is surely "Not likely to lead to secession of large part of country".

* That said some predictions made in the 18th and 19th centuries that power would move from Europe to North America & Russia turned out to be accurate for the 20th century.

GM

Forty years ago J.K. Galbraith illustrated the immunity that large corporations have from market forces with the following example:

“Since General Motors produces some half of all the automobiles, its designs do not reflect the current mode, but are the current mode. The proper shape of an automobile, for most people, will be what the automobile makers decree the current shape to be”

That theory looks rather strained now.

Just out of interest does anyone really think that the US government is going to be able to run a car company with any more success than the UK government ran British Leyland?

My Prediction.

Plus the Democrats to pick up 6 Senate seats.

The Debate.

I predict that by tomorrow morning hordes of Obama astroturfers will be clogging blog comment boxes repeating the identical talking points which they've been fed by Obama HQ.

Call me Nostradamus.

More 2008 Predictions.

I was realy planning on making some New Year's predictions about British politics for 2008, but with no major events due I find it difficult to see what will change much in the next 12 months. The polls will fluctuate but the basic fact of a Tory lead over Labour will remain. Other predictions:

• The Lib Dems will do mildly better but won't be back to the standing they had when the drunk led them.
  
• If the government does continue to flatline then there will probably be a panicky reshuffle this year with Alastair Darling either sacked or demoted.
• Boris Johnson will win despite Livingstone running an exceptionally vicious campaign.
  

So Does This Mean That US Voters Are Racist Hicks After All?

The Independent's front page, something about counting chickens springs to mind. I guess waiting for the actual result would have ruined the coronation.

Predictions.

Since this is the time for making predictions about the year ahead I'll make some later this week.
However because the US election season formally begins tomorrow my predictions about that will be out of date if I leave it till Friday so my prediction is this, Barack Obama to beat John McCain in November.

My reasoning is this, with Guliani trailing in the key battleground states and Thompson tanking everywhere those two cannot win. Huckabee might win Iowa* but he is just too out there politically for many more Republicans to back him. So that leaves Romney and McCain, but because of Romney's early front runner status in New Hampshire and Iowa he will be dead in the water if Huckabee takes Iowa and McCain New Hampshire, as now appears likely.

As for the Democrats, Obama is the best communicator among all the candidates and can use that to recover from almost any setback whereas Hilary Clinton depends on getting people to vote for her because they think she will win so if she loses momentum she won't be able to recover. Edwards is too ridiculous to consider seriously.

Unfortunately Obama's easy manner and ability to make fossilised 1960s politics sound fresh will probably enable him to beat the substantial yet somewhat grouchy John McCain in the Presidential vote.

If a Republican does win though expect the inevitable barrage of conspiracy theories to emerge, despite the fact that electoral fraud is more accurately associated with the other side in US politics with their big city political machines and dead Indians on reservations.

* Incidentally as Mark Holland points out, the Iowa Caucus is a travesty of a democratic process. Also is it "Iowa Caucus" or "Iowa Caucuses"?