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Author: robert

Buckingham: A Challenge to My Dad

Buckingham: A Challenge to My Dad

Five Reasons Why UKIP Won’t Win In Buckingham (1) The Speaker’s Absolute Number of Votes Holds Up Very Well. Perhaps it’s because the speaker is a naturally prestigous role, but contested by the other parties or not, the speakers’ vote has tended to hold up very well. In fact if you look at the average votes the speaker has got, going back to 1974, and compares it to the average that parties polled in the surrounding elections then you see…

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The New Election Model – Part II

The New Election Model – Part II

Two weeks ago, I introduced a new election forecasting model. This generated much heat, and a little light in the numerous comments. Many were scepticical, arguing that it used proportional swing, others asked how a model that produced such different results to Unified National Swing could be taken seriously. Many of the criticisms came from a lack of understanding of how the model – which we’ve nicknamed Voter Intention Prediction Analysis, or VIPA – works. This post explains why VIPA…

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Introducing an advanced election forecasting system

Introducing an advanced election forecasting system

(This is a post from Robert Smithson, not Mike Smithson!) Electoral Calculus says a Conservative majority of 26.. Anthony Wells reckons it results in a 12 seat majority.. Hill & Knowlton has it as No Overall Control.. But could it really be 150 Tory majority? Yes. Because traditional election forecasting tools are flawed. Electoral Calculus, and the rest, use Unified National Swing as the bedrock of their analysis. But this has a fundamental defect: it assumes parties pile up votes…

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Emergency Server Upgrade

Emergency Server Upgrade

A message from Robert Smithson – who keeps PB running As some of you may have noticed, pb.com just had an hour of downtime. Checking through the logs, our machine has been running at 100% capacity for the last few days, and it’s time (again) to go through a necessary upgrade. Currently, Politicalbetting runs on a single server at 1and1.co.uk. On this machine there are two “programs” that run – one is the web server (apache2) and the other is…

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Can Clinton Do It?

Can Clinton Do It?

Hillary has a plan; win the popular vote and persuade the super-delegates that she is not just the better candidate but has a moral claim to the nomination. Should the gap in pledged delegates be less than 100, then this might just work. The only problem she has is that the maths is hard; very hard. Excluding Florida, Hillary needs to pull back 410,000 votes between now and the final primary. (And she’ll be hard pressed to include Puerto Rico…

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Server Migration Complete

Server Migration Complete

Surprisingly, the server migration appears to have gone through relatively painlessly. Hopefully the site should run a little more quickly now, especially under heavy load. Thanks for your patience, Robert

Upcoming Server Maintenance

Upcoming Server Maintenance

As some of you may have noticed at 2:20am on Super Tuesday, our existing server infrastructure (which was put in place three and a half years ago), is creaking. A new server has been acquired, and on Sunday (starting in the small hours of the morning) we’ll be migrating everything across. With a little luck, everything will be up and running by 8am on Sunday morning. But, of course, it may take longer, be more complex, etc., than anticipated. Normal…

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