Iam Scott politics blog

"A majority has always been a very, very long shot" This is apparently what Nicola Sturgeon has said today when arriving at her count today. Let that sink in. This is the person who was telling us that we needed an SNP majority to force Boris Johnson to concede a section 20. This is the person who told us don't gamble your vote. This is the person who told us don't vote for Alex Salmond because he is a gambler. She just admitted that she has gambled Scotlands future for the sake of a one-party majority in an election system designed to produce coalition governments. She had the opportunity to support a supermajority. She had the opportunity to run a positive campaign. She chose to reject those options and smear a fellow Independence supporting politician for her own and her parties gain. Whatever the outcome of this election, she has lost my support!

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...