Iam Scott politics blog

When it comes to trying to predict election results with modelling you need to take the bad with the good. The results of your modelling may not show the outcome you desire. But you must resist the temptation to alter your modelling to reflect your own personal world view. However, at the same time, you can theorise why the results your model produce do not match your expectations. This brings us to the well know phase in the computing world "Garbage in = garbage out", in other words, the results you get are only as reliable as the data you give the model. So in this context that is the polling results, is the polling reliable? The truth is we won't know until the actual election results are in. But why might the polls be inaccurate, well historically new political parties have a hard time being picked up by the polling companies. We are also getting some very different results from different pollsters. This could be in-house bias, sampling variation. There are two pollst...

Have you ever wondered if you are talking to the right people or just wasting your time? I certainly have as you can probably tell from these articles here and here on fake Twitter accounts. Also, I did wonder if my strategy of talking to SNP 1&2 voters was just a waste of time. Guess what, it is a waste of time, but not for the reasons I first thought. Initially, I thought it might be a waste of time because those voters may be so invested in the SNP that they wouldn't listen to or accept evidence that contradicted their world view. But then I discovered how to view statistics for my blog and it looked like an interesting way to do a little experiment. The statistics allow me to see what country the visitors to my blog come from, so I wondered what percentage of visitors actually had a vote in this upcoming Holyrood election. I also wondered about some quite prolific anti-Alba Twitter accounts who claim to be in Scotland, so I came up with a little experiment. This experimen...

In my last article , I talked about the way the state could and probably does try and influence the outcomes in Scottish politics by trying to sow division and disenfranchisement amongst Independence supporters. But there are other groups trying to influence the outcomes of the election to further their own agendas. And let's be clear, there is nothing wrong with any group trying to influence people to vote in a certain way, so long as you do it honestly i.e. make your case and persuade voters or the merits of your agenda. Where it becomes a problem is when agendas are hidden. Now we step into the controversial issue of gender politics in Scotland. Let's be clear, in this article I am not advocating for one side or the other in the gender reform debate, as that would detract from the whole point of the article, although so toxic is this debate that I am sure I will get abuse for pointing out what follows. On social media platforms like Twitter, you will see a lot of people advo...

Apparently, I'm a fake Yesser. I'm actually a Unionist! Actually, it's worse than that, I'm a member of something called the  #77thBrigade As someone who voted Yes in 2014 and attended numerous indy marches, tweeted and retweeted in support of independence for years, you can imagine just how shocked I was to find this out about myself. Just goes to show, you think you know yourself, but you really don't. To find out who you really are you need someone like @JohnCoy29071630 on Twitter to tell you. To put this into context, I replied to this tweet by @JohnCoy29071630 "More & more I'm seeing people who say they are Supporters of the Alba Party, saying they don't want Independence now. Anyone who Is true supporter of Scottish Independence, would never act that way. Whatever their motives are Independence for Scotland Is definitely not one." So it is clear that he is trying to smear Alba and its supporters as not true Independence supporters. And pr...

Today has been seen by many as proof that Alba is finished and is only doing damage to the Independence movement based on 2 new polls. It has to be said that the vast majority of those shouting this from the rafters are SNP 1&2 evangelists, closely followed by SNP 1 Green 2 evangelists. But the reality is that it is the failure of these anti-Alba evangelists to realise the potential opportunity that is causing the real damage. Because not only are they extremely vocal, they are also spreading quite a vast amount of misinformation, much in the same way as pro-Brexit campaigners did in the EU referendum. And scarcely, it is a tactic that works, because you end up fighting so many fires, proving them wrong with facts, that you inevitably miss a few and many people just see the initial lie and not the fact-based rebuttal. But back to the point, why are they wrong to say Alba is doing damage? To prove that point I will use the Financial Times Scottish election calculator so there can be...

OK, it's time to channel my inner Mystic Meg. I've been spending the last few days constructing my own modelling to specifically predict the outcome of List seats in this forthcoming election. Based on the latest opinion poll from Panelbase I've seen predictions of 5 or 6 seats for Alba. Now obviously there are different models out there and they will produce slightly different results, and my model is no exception. I did wonder how sophisticated the models for predicting list seats are, for instance, have they been modified to account for a list only party, are they taking into account regional variations in voting intentions and local issues that may sway voters in certain constituencies? So will my model do any better, well only time will tell? But because polls tend to get more accurate the closer we get to polling day, the same applies to the modelling for seat projections. There is also the question of how accurate the polls are in this new reality of a list only Inde...