Comments on: Farewell to the Swingometer?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 11:41:03 +0000

Hi! Nice site you got there!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 04:30:39 +0000

I love everything about this site!!

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 10 May 2005 09:41:08 +0000

Monjo – both the SNP and Plaid Cymru saw their shares of the vote drop, but the SNP managed to target effectively (and take advantage of the Labour vote dropping even more) to gain two seats, whereas Plaid lost one in Wales to the Liberal Democrats.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 10 May 2005 09:12:43 +0000

I quite like the idea of a three-way swingometer – it can’t be that difficult to animate it with two axes of movement.

It wouldn’t even be that hard to engineer a physical one, and that would have the advantage of chasing Peter Snow around the studio in a twisted homage to Edgar Allan Poe.

By: Monjo

Monjo — Mon, 09 May 2005 15:46:52 +0000

Any clue as to the movements towards ‘nationalist’ parties? In Northern Ireland it seemed the two more extreme parties picked up votes. It also seemed to me that in Scotland the SNP grew. Did Plaid Cymru also grow in Wales?

If politics should become more localised then this may mean continued growth for SNP & Plaid Cymru – or a marginalisation for Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in Scotland & Wales. This could help the Conservatives.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 09 May 2005 14:04:00 +0000

Quite, fist. In England, for example, we give them more votes than any other party.

By: fist

fist — Mon, 09 May 2005 13:29:42 +0000

But we don’t let totally out of date things die in this country. The Conservative Party, for instance.

By: Edis Bevan

Edis Bevan — Mon, 09 May 2005 12:47:51 +0000

The contrast between Rochdale and Oldham East is rooted in local factors I think. Rochdale was Liberal, then Libdem, from 1972 through to 1997 so there is a familiarity with the concept of a non-Labour MP (Cyril Smith and then Liz Lynn).

I believe Liz Lynn lost in 1997 partly because of a Labour-inspired word-of-mouth campaign amongst Moslem voters. Liz was an outstanding, indeed the leading, Parliamentary campaigner against the Child Support Agency mess. This was reframed by Labour as being ‘anti-family’ and several leading Moslem comunity leaders in Rochdale spoke out aginst her on these erroneous grounds. Under current conditions we could this year have seen a larger than usual recovery of LibDem support in the Moslem community in Rochdale.

Edis

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 08 May 2005 21:54:09 +0000

Well said, Anthony.

Isn’t all this stuff about uniform national swing not existing a bit of shadowboxing, anyway? Everyone knows different seats will differ in their swings, and everyone has always known that. The value of thinking in terms of uniform national swing is that when you do get an odd result, you can actually understand how odd it is by comparing to the average for everywhere else, just as Anthony did above.

Those who invest in stock market funds will know about the simple principle that any gains by someone will have to be offset by losses from someone else – so that the average fund can do no better than the average. But only by thinking in terms of the average and bearing that average in mind can one understand how remarkable (or remarkably bad) x fund or y candidate’s performance is.

By: Phil Hunt

Phil Hunt — Sun, 08 May 2005 21:39:18 +0000

Thanks for that, Anthony