Tag: Elections
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Do Virginia and New Jersey tell us anything about the mid-terms?
Democrats had a staggeringly positive set of elections on Tuesday 4th November. Zohran Mamdani dominated headlines, defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo to become the New York’s first Muslim mayor and one of the most senior democratic socialists in America. But Dems also dominated elsewhere—in governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia (as well as those…
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Who voted for Zohran Mamdani?
Zohram Mamdani’s triumph over Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic primary signals a shift towards the progressive wing of the party. Mamdani excelled among younger, Hispanic, and Asian voters, while struggling with older Black voters.
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Could Conservative “Don’t Knows” be causing the next big polling error?
YouGov has released its first UK-wide MRP since the 2019 election. Like all UK polls in the past two years, it shows a substantial Labour victory. However, with YouGov’s strong track record of UK MRP, the results have created a splash with politicos. While most commentators focussed on the magnitude of Labour’s victory (a 120…
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Why mid-term MRPs might be understating the Liberal Democrats
Recent polls have shown the Liberal Democrats struggling to increase their vote share nationwide, lagging behind their 2019 result. The hope for Lib Dems is that a falling tide drops (sinks?) all boats, with Lib Dem candidates winning where the Tory vote collapses, even without being the direct beneficiaries. Projections using Uniform Swing and Multilevel…
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Convergence between parties and Brexit vote happens in both directions
Since 2016, EU Referendum vote has been highly predictive of voting behaviour. It is well established that the Conservatives won many leave-voting Labour supporters at the 2019 election, helping to secure a huge majority. Meanwhile, Labour and the Liberal Democrats fared comparatively better in Remain-voting areas. Generally, this discussion focusses on partisan defections ’caused by’…
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Projecting results under the new Welsh constituency boundaries
Today, the Boundary Commission for Wales published its revised proposals for the 2023 Parliamentary Review. This includes 32 constituencies to replace the current 40. Here, I use demographic data to project the 2019 election results under the new boundaries. In 2019, Labour won 22 MPs, the Conservatives 14 and Plaid Cymru 4. The new boundaries…
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What effect did progressive cooperation have on the 2022 English local elections?
This research was originally posted as an LSE Politics and Policy blog post, here. Across England, hundreds of wards in the local elections had only one ‘progressive’ candidate (Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green). I have tried to estimate the effect that this had on their vote shares, using a technique called “Coarsened Exact Matching” (CEM).…
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How might the 2021 Senedd election have looked under the proposed new system?
My blog for Make Votes Matter on the proposed Senedd electoral system. Yesterday, Mark Drakeford and Adam Price published a “joint position statement” on Senedd reform. The agreement proposed the use of a closed list D’Hondt PR system to elect 96 Members of the Senedd (MSs). The system would have 16 constituencies, each electing 6…
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People are surprisingly good at predicting local election results
I have previously looked at how British Election Study respondents view local crime rates (spoiler: people are very bad at judging local crime). But I had not realised there are also questions, last asked just before the 2019 election, asking respondents which party they thought would win locally. Being honest, I expected the predictions to…
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2021 Metro Mayor Elections: Labour narrowly gained from the Conservatives while losing to “Did Not Vote”
The eight Combined Authority (“Metro”) Mayor elections in May 2021 were some of Labour’s most successful of the cycle. Despite poor results elsewhere, Labour managed to pick up two mayoralties directly from the Conservatives (West of England and Cambridgeshire) and a third newly created position (West Yorkshire). The gains ended up being overshadowed, partly because…
Owen Winter 