General Erection 2019

[David]

20 hours ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

That doesn’t mean you can’t vote though does it?

It does, I'm not registered anywhere in the UK to vote. I don't really live in the UK full-time in all honesty. I could maybe find a way to do so if I really looked into it, but like I said before, i'm bothered just enough about the whole thing to discuss on a wrestling forum in my free time, but nowhere near enough to spend any length of time on it. That includes keeping up to speed on what's going on, or spending time finding out how I'd go about voting.

It's just not that big an issue for me really. It's up there with discussing WWE "superstars" being held hostage in Saudi Arabia.

20 hours ago, The King Of Swing said:

Of course many people wouldn't see it that way but that's their problem.

In much the same way as we'll no doubt hear cries of complaint if the 'Tories win a majority in the election and manage to get their deal through despite them getting less than half of the popular vote. There's always that feeling that the system as it is kinda fucks people over. 

5 hours ago, The King Of Swing said:

Another common theme I've come across from some leavers is I'll never vote again if we don't leave the EU.

Not really sure how that helps their cause.

It doesn't help their cause, but surely you can see it from their point of view? A lot of people who are thoroughly disenfranchised with the political system decided to vote in the EU referendum because it's something, rightly or wrongly, they feel strongly about.

After doing that, and the vote going in what they consider the way they wanted, there's a risk that their vote will have been for fuck all, with a redo called because it wasn't, as they see it, the result that the establishment really wanted.

It's easy to look at the 'Tories as the Brexit party now, but back when the vote was taking place they were mainly a remain outfit, with the likes of David Cameron and Theresa May being on the remain side. There was little by way of any mainstream political backing for leave. They had Boris (who had wavered between sides in the weeks leading up to the official campaign), Farage, the dude who Cumberbatch played in the TV show, that 'Tory with no chin, as well as Mogg.

If Labour win this election, for example, and a redo is called, you can understand some people just thinking "you know what? My vote obviously doesn't matter, even when what I voted for wins. So, fuck it. Why bother?"

Imagine how a lot of people on the other side would feel if the vote to remain won, but the 'Tories won the next election and decided to run a do-over? They'd be well fucked off by that, and rightfully so. 

[quote the raven]

Then you vote for the people that are going to act on what you deem is right. 

If you voted leave there are two very clear parties that are promising to act on it. 

If you can’t be bothered to vote for them then I’d suggest that you never really gave a shit in the first place. 

I never understand the mindset behind not bothering to vote based on the “ won’t make and difference” argument 
 

[David]

Yeah, but if you've actually got the referendum you wanted, and what you voted for has prevailed in that vote, only for it to be overturned and redone, why would anyone think that voting for a party who would likely have to go through the whole process all over again would result in anything different?

It's a perfectly understandable mindset in all honesty. I could fully sympathise with someone who feels completely disenfranchised with the whole process. 

 

[quote the raven]

1 hour ago, David said:

why would anyone think that voting for a party who would likely have to go through the whole process all over again would result in anything different?

 

 

Ok do you get the Tory and brexit party pledges? 
 

I can only assume not 

[David]

1 minute ago, quote the raven said:

Ok do you get the Tory and brexit party pledges? 
 

I can only assume not 

I'm not sure if you've maybe jumped into this conversation and not looked at what I initially replied to, which was people saying "I'll never vote again if we don't leave the EU." I'm working on the basis that events have unfolded in such a manner that the UK doesn't leave the EU, meaning a win for the Liberal Democrats or Labour or suchlike, resulting in a do-over.

As things stand with this election coming up next month then of course it make sense to vote in favour of the Conservatives to get the Brexit deal pushed through.

 

[Retro Red]

Raven - You're missing David's point, disenfranchised voters are entirely possible in this current landscape and totally understandable without the blanket 'well they obviously didn't care to begin with'. Just because you say 'well you just vote for the party that represents what you want to happen' doesn't mean people might have had enough of the shit-show that has been our political process over the last 5 years. It's also possible that people who voted to leave the EU last time might give up on voting in future if the party elected this time managed to get a 2nd referendum and we end up staying in.

In Scotland where we've also had the Indyref and potentially another if the SNP win the majority up here again, although Prime Minister Johnson has said he'll refuse it if the Tories stay in power. It's just been vote after vote with no end in sight.

[quote the raven]

1 hour ago, Bicurious Dad said:

Raven - You're missing David's point, disenfranchised voters are entirely possible in this current landscape and totally understandable without the blanket 'well they obviously didn't care to begin with'. Just because you say 'well you just vote for the party that represents what you want to happen' doesn't mean people might have had enough of the shit-show that has been our political process over the last 5 years. It's also possible that people who voted to leave the EU last time might give up on voting in future if the party elected this time managed to get a 2nd referendum and we end up staying in.

In Scotland where we've also had the Indyref and potentially another if the SNP win the majority up here again, although Prime Minister Johnson has said he'll refuse it if the Tories stay in power. It's just been vote after vote with no end in sight.

Im not missing it i just dont understand how its even a thing.  

Im a leave voter. If for what ever unlikely reason the Lib Dems won and revoked i would see that as a clear change in the counties mandate. Id be a bit pissed but not to the point of throwing my toys out the pram and refusing to ever vote again.

I would hazard a real good guess that on this forum are Labour voters in ultra safe Tory seats that will still go out and vote Labour even tho its a given lost cause because they believe in the party and policy. 

I will stand by my statement that anyone that gives up voting over brexit probably wasn't that bothered in the first place. 

 

 

[The King Of Swing]

Most of the ex Labour voters I know abandoned Labour after in their words Tony Blair let them all in and have shown no indication of coming back.

Much like Trump's base I've adopted a "fuck em" attitude to the hardcore leave block. There's no winning the leave at any cost types over so there's little point in trying.

I don't even talk politics offline anymore unless it's brought up.

Labour need to stick to a positive campaign and not play the Tories Brexit game.

[Keith Houchen]

I really don't like the idea of one policy deciding your vote.  If you vote Lib Dem solely because you want to remain, then you ignore every single other policy they have.  Same goes if you vote tory to leave.

Serial loser Nigel Farage of the Brexit Party Limited has said he isn't standing for another defeat in this election.  He announced this after seeing how shit they were polling.  Bit of a shitter for Brexit Party donors (They don't have members) who paid up the vetting fee for their application to be a candidate when the party leader, who can't be removed because they don't have members, isn't going to stand.

I guess on the plus side, this means he shouldn't be given any more airtime in the election coverage.  Then again, a month or so ago he was boycotting the BBC, but there he was on The Andrew Marr Show today.

[Hannibal Scorch]

If your not sure how the party leaders fit with your own interests this is a quick table. This based on their voting records. You can look up the individuals via this website. 

Had to look at voting records separately to confirm before sharing - but here's the separate sources for those:

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10999/boris_johnson/uxbridge_and_south_ruislip/votes

 

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/search/?q=Jeremy+corbyn

 

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/search/?q=Jo+swinson

[JNLister]

FWIW, that chart does resemble previous lists that are presented as "Swinson voted for more Tory policies that Johnson~!~!" which kinda misses out that Johnson wasn't an MP between 2008 and 2015.

[Factotum]

I feel the Labour campaign has kicked off very strongly. Hammering on home policies. They know the Tories will make this all about Brexit, but he needs to dodge that and lead a hopeful campaign of change. Let Boris Johnson get bogged down

[tiger_rick]

They've got no chance. It's a single issue election. That's a shame because on anything else, they've got a far better chance but the news, the written media, social media is all about Brexit. Labour have been wooly on it from the start. They're no better now.

This whole election is going to be fucking miserable.

[Factotum]

Quote

They've got no chance. It's a single issue election.

You say that, but they can change that narrative. 2017 was seen as a single issue election as well, May's whole campaign was around Brexit and it backfired. I'm not saying they will win a majority or anything, but they have to attempt to push things like the NHS as the main focal point. They can use Brexit to pivot into a wide range of areas.

[JNLister]

So, let's talk polls and why they vary.

Quick history: Once upon a time opinion polls were generally less sophisticated but broadly in the right ballpark, partly because all you really had to worry about was Labour-Conservative swing. 1970 polls were "wrong" but that was chalked up to a genuine late shift in opinion that came too late to capture in polls that took several days to carry out and process.

1992 was a famous fuck-up that made it look like a hung parliament when the Tories really won a majority. The most famous explanation was Shy Tories (people saying "not sure" out of social stigma when they knew they going to vote Conservative) but there's also a theory a lot of people changed their minds on the day when they rethought putting Kinnock in.

1997-2010 was uncontroversial. 1997 polls were actually a fair bit off, but it just meant the difference between "Labour win a landslide" and "Labour win a slightly different landslide" so nobody cared."

2015 was a fairly consistent error across the industry overstating Labour's position. The most likely explanation as a simple problem of people willing to take part in polls were inherently more interested in politics than the average voter, and those people were more likely to be Labour-leaning. You also had a problem of herding where pollsters start adjusting or downplaying unusual results because they fear they must be wrong. One pollster even had a poll due for publication on voting day that got the result exactly right and didn't publish it because they were scared of looking silly. It was a serious issue as the polls meant there was a big assumption of a hung parliament and the campaign was dominated by whether Labour would do a deal with the SNP rather than real scrutiny of the big party policies.

2017 was a completely different situation where almost everyone overstated the Conservative figure to differing degrees. This wasn't actually a mistake with the polling: the raw figures (once you adjusted to get the right balance of men vs women, rich vs poor, etc etc) were largely accurate, so simply listening to what people said would have worked. The problem was that pollsters tried to compensate for 2015 by applying "turnout filters" which basically assumed a varying degree of young voters/Labour voters wouldn't turn up. The bigger that assumption, the more wrong the forecast turned out to be.

The big winner was YouGov's MRP model, which works more like an exit poll and less like a traditional poll. In simple terms, it's all about forecasting the results in individual seats rather than a national vote share. It's a combination of polling a very large number of people online and analyzing a lot of demographic data about them. The basic idea is you spot patterns like "people in Scottish cities are going more SNP" or "people who voted Leave are going back to Labour" or "young women with degrees are more likely to switch to Green" and then cross-reference them across what you know about individual seats like "there's loads of graduates here" or "this place is traditionally Labour but heavily voted Leave" and figure out how the different effects will combine. That's how they not only forecast a hung parliament, but also some unexpected results like Canterbury for Labour.

This time round, it's fair to say polls are all over the place. Everyone's got the same basic order (Conservative > Labour > Lib Dem > Brexit) but the figures are wildly varying, particularly for the implied result which right now is anything from "Tory landslide" to "Small Tory majority that could easily slip away". There's so much variation it must be down to differing methods.

One big issue is that pollsters usually weight results to try to make sure their sample represents the public based on the last result. So in any sample you take now, the number saying they voted Tory last time should be barely above that ahead of Labour. In fact, the proportion saying they voted Labour last time is much smaller than it should be, which could mean pollsters aren't finding enough 2017 Labour voters or could mean people are "forgetting"/not admitting what they did last time. Similarly, in 2017 the proportion of people saying "Don't know" at the start of the campaign was high and dropped as the Labour poll ratings rose, suggesting "natural" Labour supporters had their doubts about Corbyn but eventually "came home". In both cases, if and how you try to account for that now makes a big difference to the result.

The upshot is the variation is going to be very confusing, particularly if Labour do genuinely narrow the gap and the variation among pollsters starts to be about the actual outcome rather than just the margin of Tory victory. My best advice is:

* Don't get too excited about any single poll.

* Always compare poll figures to the last poll from the same company rather than to recent figures from other pollsters.

* Pay more attention to the trends (eg how often you see Tory-Labour leads increasing or decreasing) rather than individual figures.

* Bear in mind that there's much more question this time about how the vote share translates to seats because of changing "battlegrounds" as Leave vs Remain becomes more influential on how people vote. In particular, we really don't know how big a lead the Conservatives need to secure a majority of seats, which is pretty much the key point to how Brexit plays out.

 

Edit: A couple of extra notes:

* Be wary of polls of individual constituencies. These tend to be commissioned by parties. That doesn't make them less accurate, but does mean they only get published in full if and when the party themselves cites the figures publicly. By definition, parties only do that when they produce an interesting/unexpected/favorable response. So there may be plenty of polls saying stuff like "nah, Tories don't actually have a shot in Wigan" or "Johnson's actually a shoe-in in Uxbridge" that never get published.

* Watch out for Twitter prank account @Britainerects, which does its best to appear to be the legitimate @Britainelects and then publish comedic made up polls that make people get excited because the Isle of Wight is going Green.

Edited November 4, 2019 by JNLister