Unpredictable prediction errors
The assumption made was that the following percentage of party voters would vote Yes: SNP — 81.7%, Labour — 25.8%, Tory — 5.9%, LibDem — 26.2%, Others — 50.0%. (That is, I expected 81.7% of the people who voted SNP in the council elections to vote Yes to independence.)
A survey made by Lord Ashcroft (PDF) found that 86% of SNP voters, 37% of Labour voters, 5% of Tories and 39% of LibDem voters voted Yes to independence, but this was based on people’s recollection of their last Westminster vote, not the council elections. Also, this was based on a small sample, so these numbers may not be entirely accurate.
To test this, I wrote a computer program to work out the percentages that would have produced the best prediction of the actual result (still based on the council election results). The results are rather surprising: SNP — 64.6%, Labour — 50.3%, Tory — 9.1%, LibDem — 33.4%, Others — 36.9%. Using these percentages produces a decent prediction of the actual result (although a few council areas are wrong, such as Dundee, which performed much better than the revised prediction, and West Lothian, which performed worse).
I don’t claim that these revised percentages are accurate — you’d need a massive exit poll to make sure — but they show that many strong SNP areas performed much worse than I had expected, and many Labour areas performed much better.
To illustrate this, look at the differences between the old prediction and the actual result (the table has been sorted by the difference):
| Council area | Old prediction | Actual result | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orkney Islands | 56% | 33% | -23% |
| Shetland Islands | 56% | 36% | -20% |
| Moray | 60% | 42% | -18% |
| Scottish Borders | 47% | 33% | -14% |
| Aberdeenshire | 53% | 40% | -13% |
| Angus | 57% | 44% | -13% |
| Argyll and Bute | 53% | 41% | -12% |
| East Lothian | 49% | 38% | -11% |
| Na h-Eileanan an Iar | 58% | 47% | -11% |
| Perth and Kinross | 51% | 40% | -11% |
| West Lothian | 55% | 45% | -10% |
| Clackmannanshire | 55% | 46% | -9% |
| Midlothian | 53% | 44% | -9% |
| Dumfries and Galloway | 43% | 34% | -9% |
| East Ayrshire | 55% | 47% | -8% |
| Aberdeen | 49% | 41% | -8% |
| Falkirk | 54% | 47% | -7% |
| Highland | 54% | 47% | -7% |
| Stirling | 47% | 40% | -7% |
| Fife | 51% | 45% | -6% |
| South Lanarkshire | 51% | 45% | -6% |
| Renfrewshire | 52% | 47% | -5% |
| East Dunbartonshire | 44% | 39% | -5% |
| North Ayrshire | 53% | 49% | -4% |
| Edinburgh | 43% | 39% | -4% |
| East Renfrewshire | 40% | 37% | -3% |
| North Lanarkshire | 53% | 51% | -2% |
| West Dunbartonshire | 56% | 54% | -2% |
| South Ayrshire | 43% | 42% | -1% |
| Dundee | 56% | 57% | 1% |
| Inverclyde | 49% | 50% | 1% |
| Glasgow | 51% | 53% | 2% |
Orkney and Shetland might be special cases, because they are so far away from Edinburgh, but what happened in places such as Moray, Aberdeenshire and Angus? Did the focus on winning over the Labour voters in Greater Glasgow make the rural SNP voters desert independence?
Going forward, we need to ensure that independence doesn’t become solely a left-wing ambition. Independence will be good for almost everybody in Scotland, and next time we need to work harder on making independence the choice of people everywhere, not just in and around Glasgow and Dundee.
RT @arcofprosperity: New blog post: Unpredictable prediction errors http://t.co/dlLqgbnZ9U #the45 #indyref
Interesting – it seems clear that the Yes campaign’s heavily left-wing redistributive vision of an independent Scotland alienated more affluent voters. Those voters also would have been much more likely to be worried by the “uncertainties” on what would happen to Scotland economically.
Indeed. Some of these voters were probably never going to vote Yes anyway, simply because they had too much to lose, but surely many of them were potential Yes voters.
I’d like to hear from Yes campaigners from these areas what their experience was on the ground. Did anything in particular frighten these voters? What do they think should have been done differently?
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