Who will win the election? Facebook fills us in

Who will win if Gordon Brown isn't a big girl's blouse and calls an election?  Populus, ICM and the other polling companies will publish their figures over the next couple of days. But Comment Central can scoop them all by announcing that Labour will walk a November election.

For the past 15 minutes we have done some extensive and intensive crunching of polling data. Our method was to take a carefully selected and weighted group of voters (facebook members), then find out how many of them in idle moments between playing online Solitaire and checking eBay signed up to pro or anti-Brown/Cameron groups. We filtered out groups such as "I notice Gordon Brown's 'Mouth-Thing'" because it is difficult to ascertain whether having an opinion on his "mouth-thing" would effect voting intentions, and excluded those with less than 15 members because we were getting fatigued/bored by the task. The results give an accurate picture of the mood of the nation, within a three per cent margin of error.

The results:

PRO-CAMERON 1,389  ANTI-CAMERON 4,342

PRO-BROWN    1,318   ANTI-BROWN    3,031

Well, the public loathe both of them but it would be electorally impossible for both to lose. So assuming the anti-Cameroons vote for Labour, and the anti-Broons vote Tory, Labour will walk it.

Robbie Millen

Comments

[Kevin Davis]

Hmmm! That is about as scientific as tossing a coin!

[David Moss]

Like Gordon Brown, and now it seems, Robbie Millen, I, too, despise the facts and during an extensive fact-finding cigarette break just now invented the following one, which may or may not* be reported as follows in The Economist of 9 November 2007:

NEW WORLD
It was a repeated assertion of Tony Blair's that we live in a new world. Anyone with half a brain dismissed this terminological inexactitude for what it is -- an excuse to tear up the old rulebook and make up whatever new rules occurred to him while sitting on the sofa.

But now, we wonder. Do we, after all, really live in a new world? The psephological evidence coming in as we went to press suggests that something has just happened that has never happened before.

Yes, yes, yes, Gordon Brown has been elected as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom excluding large parts of Scottish policy and a growing amount of Welsh policy. But that is not the new thing that we have in mind.

In yesterday's snowstorms [see Global Warming supplement] it seems that almost no Labour voters could get to a polling booth.

Municipal grit-spreaders are mostly Conservative voters and refused to work yesterday. As a result, Labour clogs couldn't get any purchase [see Credit crunch, p.26]. The same problem kept Liberal Democrat sandals away from the polling booths.

And the postal strike means that no postal votes can be counted for another three months [see Bury your own dead -- is 2007 the new 1979?, p.27].

The effect is that only Conservative voters with four-wheel drives could vote. And only the intelligent ones, at that -- the ones who know how to engage four-wheel drive.

So that it is not just his small majority which Gordon Brown owes to Conservative voters, but most of his vote.

Never before have the supporters of one party elected the other one. Truly, or at least psephologically, we live in a new world.

----------
* Please do not try this at home. Do not try to find this article in The Economist. It doesn't exist. I had one person get very shirty a few months ago when he wasted a lot of time trying to find one of these spoofs, http://forum.no2id.net/viewtopic.php?p=70812&highlight=#70812

omg