Regional polls

I’ve been a fan of Electoral Calculus for some time, especially of the pages that allows you to predict Westminster elections, either for the UK or for Scotland only.

However, it’s often annoyed me that you had to do either, but never both at the same time. Because the Conservative revival hasn’t happened north of the border, where we’ve instead seen an SNP surge instead, it’s been a problem for accurately predicting the results of an election.

So I wrote to Martin Baxter some weeks ago, and now he has implemented my suggestion!

It’s only a beta version for now, but it seems to work really well. You can put in national values and it will then fill in regional values that you can then override where necessary. Do try it!

I tried it out using two recent opinion polls. Counting seats, instead of Cons 450, Lab 148 and LD 24, I get Cons 450, Lab 138, LD 21 and Nat 21.