This is going to greatly complicate efforts to estimate the parties' national standings from local election results and compare them to past years. This is a tricky enough exercise at the best of times but will be particularly hard this May... www.ft.com/content/ada5... - ThreadSky

robfordmancs.bsky.social • 53 days ago

This is going to greatly complicate efforts to estimate the parties' national standings from local election results and compare them to past years. This is a tricky enough exercise at the best of times but will be particularly hard this May...

https://www.ft.com/content/ada5f870-a278-4d46-bbbc-098f4f46c1e7

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robfordmancs.bsky.social•53 days ago

There are various ways to keep score in local election rounds - seats gained & lost, councils gained & lost, and projections of the national vote (one, the PNS, from the BBC's elections team, who I work with, and one, the NEV) from Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher. This complicates all of them

robfordmancs.bsky.social•53 days ago

Less councils up for election obviously means less seats and local authorities available to win or lose. The councils disappearing are unlikely to be a purely random subset of those who were due to hold contests, so this impacts also the risks/opportunities to each party.

robfordmancs.bsky.social•53 days ago

A big chunk of the council seats disappearance also gives analysts a smaller base of evidence on which to build their projection models. The models can deal with unbalanced sets of elections - that's why they exist - but if results are highly variable then a narrow base becomes more problematic

robfordmancs.bsky.social•53 days ago

For example, imagine (not implausibly) Reform are much stronger in councils along the east coast of England than elsewhere (was true for UKIP in 2013, when similar set of councils were up). Then if all the E Coast councils planning a delay go ahead, it becomes harder to gauge overall Reform strength

robfordmancs.bsky.social•53 days ago

Models can to some extent adjust for this, but with the very politically and geographically fragmented vote right now we really need as much information as possible to get the picture right. Instead we may have less info than ever before.

robfordmancs.bsky.social•53 days ago

Tl;dr - local elections are always a limited and flawed yardstick for parties' performance. They will likely be more limited & more flawed than ever this year. Reform are likely to be the big losers from this, if deferred elections deny them chance to take seats & demonstrate strength on the ground

csav55.bsky.social•53 days ago

Tbh that might be no bad thing, I'm tired of the endless polls we have in this country. They skew opinions and may lead to voter apathy.

graybouk.bsky.social•53 days ago

Do you think that voter behaviour might change? Always a suspicion that voters behave differently in locals because they "matter less" - if a larger authority, with more powers, might they "matter more"?

juneussell.bsky.social•53 days ago

Delay it then.

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