Curtice

• However, it’s a fact that many people now want to know what England’s May 2023 local election results tell us about next year’s general election.
• All forecasting relies on projecting information from the past and for most of the time polls measuring voting intentions are subject to a lot of inertia.
• This is a big-data technique using information from many sources and was first applied to election forecasting by the American statistician Andrew Gelman and colleagues.
• Applied to the task of predicting a general election, Curtice concluded that Labour would be the largest party, but not necessarily win an overall majority.

1974-2023

• The summary line shows a strong performance in the local election correlates closely with a strong performance in the subsequent general election (r=0.67).
• Conservative seats won in general elections, and in local elections in the preceding years: The relationship can be used to forecast seats in the next general election.
• The correlation is not perfect, so using it to forecast in this way is subject to errors.
• The Conservatives took 28.6% of the seats, Labour 33.3% and the Liberal Democrats 20.2% in the local elections.
• A similar analysis for Labour forecasts that the party will win 281 seats and the Liberal Democrats 41 seats.