By Cameron Eyles
November 1 2019, 16.25
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South west London‘s marginal seats mean opinion polls and their accuracy will be scrutinised more than ever.
As the general election approaches, polls in seats such as Kensington and Richmond will be subject to much debate.
Flavible Politics predicts the Conservatives will re-take Kensington while new Liberal Democrat candidate Sam Gyimah will push current Labour MP Emma Dent Coad into third place.
Flavible Politics founder George Rushton said: “I believe that a single isolated poll has minimal use.
“A better use of opinion polls is to study them over time. This is to find trends more than the current snapshot.”
Polls widely predicted the Conservatives to hold Kensington in 2017 yet they lost the seat by just 20 votes.
Richmond Park Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith is predicted to lose his 45-vote majority to the Liberal Democrats according to Flavible.
Flavible Politics is a seat projection service that uses census data along with most major opinion polling and previous elections results to predict how a constituency will vote.
Misinterpreting of data is a huge problem that opinion polls face.
Mr Rushton said: “Constituency polling is far more likely to be an accurate representation of the constituency in question.
“Understanding what the data you are looking at is and how it was compiled is very important.”
Flavible Politics uses a unique equation factoring in Brexit voting and age demographics to predict the results.
In the past opinion polls have proved to both be correct and inaccurate.
The Brexit referendum of 2016 famously saw Remain predicted a 55% win in the final poll before the result.
But YouGov’s final poll for the 2017 election successfully predicted to within ten seats of what both Labour and the Conservatives achieved.
You can visit the Flavible website for the latest election prediction in every constituency in Great Britain.
