Jeremy's Den: An Dubhlachd Election

The Day Before Doomsday
83th anniversary of Uncle Teddy's abdication and John Kerry's 76th birthday

I'm Eighteen © Alice Cooper, Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, Neal Smith, 1971

Black Juju © Dennis Dunaway, 1971

Welcome To My Nightmare 🔊
© Alice Cooper, Dick Wagner, 1975

GB-wide polls are again popping up at a sluggish rate so the main event is again a new full Scottish poll, this time the last one Panelbase conducted between 3 and 6 December. It has received only low profile coverage in The National, probably because it's again quite disappointing for the SNP. Only caveat here is that Panelbase is usually the least 'SNP-friendly' of all pollsters who field real Scottish polls. But even them overestimated the SNP vote in 2017 so there is every reason to carefully consider what they have to say right now, which is mostly the Conservatives closing the gap with the SNP and the array of seat projections delivering only a minor success for the SNP. What was once seen as the worst case scenario for the SNP (45 seats) has now become the best case scenario. The silver lining is that only one SNP incumbent is really endangered (aye, Stephen Gethins in North East Fife) but the downside is that the Conservatives are doing better than expected and could easily spin a minor setback, like losing 'only' Stirling and Gordon, as clear support for their arch-Unionist stance. And of course would be even louder if the SNP failed to clear the 40-seat hurdle, which can no longer be brushed aside as a totally implausible outcome. The key seat here is Lanark and Hamilton East as losing it in addition to my worst-case scenario would take the SNP's headcount down to 39 and signal a very bad Election Night indeed.

Now there may be some explanations for this in the SNP's campaign itself. Though not as disjointed as it was in 2017, it lacks real direction. I thought we had a deal that the SNP would stop trying to save England from Brexit against their will, focus on Independence and hammer the Tories about their mishandling of reserved matters. And now we have Nicola Sturgeon publicly admitting a second EU referendum could happen before IndyRef2 if Labour are the next government, and also that a vote for the SNP 'need not' be a vote for Independence. Which is, whichever way you look at it, totally shambolic and at odds with the earlier campaign strategy, especially as it also allows the other parties plenty of wiggle room to hit at the SNP over their handling of devolved matters. Was a recipe for disaster in 2017 and still is today. Then we also have the 'situation' in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath that could easily turn into Nightmare On Bennochy Road: a split pro-Independence vote and Labour underperforming so the Tories sneak in through the back door and bag the seat on barely 30% of the vote, in what had been Labour territory since 1935. Back to the big picture, the updated trends of GB-wide polling remain surprisingly good for the Conservatives.

The Tory vote has admittedly reached a plateau for some time now, but Labour is failing to actually catch up even with more potential LibDem voters switching. As always there are massive contradictions in recent polls. Once undecideds removed 59% are dissatisfied and 41% satisfied with the way Johnson handles his job as PM, while 68% are dissatisfied and 32% satisfied with the way Corbyn handles his job ad Leader of the Opposition. Yet the guy with a -18% rating on performance has a +16% rating on the PMability scale and roughly a 70% probability of winning the election with an outright majority. And the same people who now rate the NHS as a more important campaign issue than Brexit are also willing to grant Johnson a five-year lease on Number Ten when he's the one oven-ready to sell off the procurement of pharmaceuticals, the keyest component of the whole system, to Trump's Big Pharma donors who will raise prices threefold and even eightfold on some rare drugs. Go figure...

The Nightmare Returns 🔊
© Alice Cooper, Bob Ezrin, 2011

There was some bad news in this week's polling for Labour when YouGov released their last pre-election full Welsh poll. The previous one, fielded two weeks ago, showed Labour in better shape than before and still projected to hold a majority of Welsh seats. Now the Conservatives have almost closed the gap in voting intentions and Labour are predicted to lose eight of their 2017 seats. There is a symbolic dimension in this too as it shows the Far Western Pillar of the Red Wall in North-East Wales totally crumbling down. Five of the expected Labour losses (Aylin and Deeside, Clwyd South, Delyn, Vale of Clwyd, Wrexham) are within the boundaries of post-industrial Clwyd who would become a completely blue blob on the map for the first time in.... well.... forever.... as it never gave the Tories a full slate even in the olden days when it was Denbighshire and Flintshire, and not even during the Thatcher era.

Meanwhile, my updated Poll'O'Polls is still pretty worrying for Labour. It includes the last six ones conducted between 5 and 10 December. Super-sample size is 14,378 as pollsters went for bigger samples in the last mile, with a theoretical 0.83% margin of error. I deliberately did not include the massive surveys published by Focaldata and YouGov yesterday as both were conducted to feed their respective MRP models over a longer period and don't represent a snapshot of current public opinion, if any poll ever does. The massive samples do not mean they are less right or more wrong, or whatever, than others or that their tiny margins of error actually mean anything. Being right might very well again prove to be just lucky guess. Anyway here's what we have in the Poll'O'Polls....

As you might expect, pollsters contradict each other about the predicted Conservatives' lead over Labour. ICM and Deltapoll find it has gone down since their previous survey, while BMG, Survation and YouGov find it has gone up, and Savanta-Comres say it's either up or down depending on which one of their older polls you pick, as they conducted two simultaneously last week that delivered different results. All this is not really helpful overall. Especially as the rolling average has moved only very slightly, by roughly 1% in Labour's direction, and is now predicting the Conservatives leading by 8.5% overall and 12% in England outside London. Guess a repeat of the 2017 upset was always too much to ask anyway....

Elected 🔊
© Alice Cooper, Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, Neal Smith, 1973

On such voting intentions my model predicts a 58-seat Conservative majority. This is slightly better for the Conservatives than three days ago because the seats they lost in England are offset by better results in Scotland and Wales. Never underestimate the colonies. Other prognosticators have updated their own projections and all that were published over the last week point to a Conservative majority, though they differ on its magnitude and mostly see it under 50 seats. The massive Tory majorities predicted by Forecast UK and Flavible definitely look like outliers here, especially when you remember Flavible's past record of wildly outlandish predictions.

Of course the most anticipated and most commented update is YouGov's new and last MRP estimate. Everybody in the commentariat remembers that YouGov were the only ones predicting a hung Parliament in 2017 though their seat count slightly underestimated the Tories and overestimated Labour and the SNP. So you might want to conclude that the Tory majority will be more solid than the 28 seats predicted by YouGov, and this is obviously possible. But you also might want to believe that a hung Parliament is still possible, and YouGov's published results also open the door to this possibility as what they actually say, after factoring in the margin of error, is that the Conservatives would bag 311 to 367 seats, and Labour 206 to 256. Focaldata, using their own version of MRP and a different data set, reach pretty much the same result. So expect the actual result to be weighted against the punditariat's best educated guess of a 30ish-seat Tory majority. That's real life media for you, lads.

Lay Down And Die, Goodbye 🔊

Under current polling we would have 78 seats changing hands, close to what happened in 1964 and 1900. One that brought a new government to power and one that was more a game of musical chairs barely changing the status quo. And we would also have 69 marginals. But of course the complete cartography of gains and losses and the possible alternate scenarios are pretty similar to what we had three days ago. And I again agree with YouGov's MRP: we could have a hung Parliament though it would certainly take one big fuck of a miracle to get it.

And of course the hung Parliament would soon deliver the New Coalition. Now it has finally dawned on Arlene Foster that Johnson is genetically engineered to lie even if you just ask for the time. So we can safely rule out any new Con-DUP trade deal even if the Irish Custom-Booth-In-The-Sea Frontstop that so angered Foster has fuck all chance of being implemented even in the unforeseeable future. So as always expect the LibDems to do the right thing: put personal interests over general interest and lend a hand in delivering Brexit. And Johnson's best stunt would be to buy them off with the promise of e second EU referendum and then actively campaign to defeat them, just as Cameron did with the Alternative Vote referendum. And of course never forget to lie through your teeth at every TV appearance, it worked so well already there's no reason to change strategy. So we're all fucked..... and some would actually love it.

So now it definitely looks like the UK is gonna serve a five year sentence without the possibility of parole. The last day of the campaign was a fitting end to all this clown show. Johnson's PR team telling ITV to fuck off while the First Minister of England ran for a fridge to hide was as hilarious as it was appalling. And now the blond buffoon will actually be elected and get a mandate to do what he does best: lying and waffle-piffling without any serious challenge from the Tory-cuddling state media and daily fish-wrappers. And so all will be fine for the billionaire corporate oligarchs as the dishevelled clown attracts all attention and they can freely puppetmaster him from the shadows. You know who they are: the garbage press owners and tax-evading entitled expats who brainchilded austerity and Universal Credit. The kind of lads who watch I, Daniel Blake weekly over their Sunday afternoon pink gins because it proves how successful they were: the masterplan was to make peoples' lives miserable and it worked beyond expectations.

And remember there is no such thing as the light at then end of the tunnel and there never was. All there is are the headlights of the runaway train coming at you at flank speed. Just don't whine, you asked for it.

Some more almost live coverage tomorrow. Just stay tuned.

You know the way to battle a lie?
With the truth? No, with a bigger lie!
(The Good Wife, episode Death Of A Client, 2013)

Jeremy's Den

11/12/2019

An Dubhlachd Election - E-1 Flash Update

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