The throat goes national

We have over the years established a bit of a track record in the election prediction business, but it’s been mainly a local effort, arsing about UL and considering the local goings-on. Not for us appearances on Rte or the radio. For the first few years the predictions were pretty good all told, especially when you understand that we weren’t actually doing anything in the way of polling as it is commonly understood. Towards the end it all unravelled a bit but we’re inclined to ignore that bad patch if you will. We thought this time out we’d have a real go at predictions on the national stage, after making a trail run at the 2007 Seanad elections. We hope to get to all the constituencies up eventually but we also might not, there are real world jobs to be done, hair needs cutting, the cowshed has to be cleaned and turf cut (ok the turf is staying in the ground until the weather is much drier and there is considerably more of a stretch in the evenings but you get the idea)

We use long established scientific methods based on travelling to the constituencies, meeting people from the constituencies, passing by people in train stations who look like they have been to the constituency and looking long and hard at the constituencies on google maps. We also combine this modern approach with consideration of the entrails of animals often times cooked into a crispy blackness and wrapped in a burger Bap. It’s unpleasant work and has done considerable harm to our figures but it works.

We might even package the lot up with some useful charts, maps and other graphics for you to download and print off your own selection to enjoy on count day. We will do some count templates for the various seats 3/4/5 seaters. And we might have charts and pretty pictures and graphics if time allows.

So let’s get predicting!

These predictions are based on the notion that irrespective of the fluctuations in the polls that the likely national of share of the vote right now is

FF 23% FG 34% Lab 19% SF 11% Green 2% Independents 9% ULA 2%

We are of the belief that there is a significant shy bladder factor at play with FF and that many of those who like that nice Mr. Gilmore won’t be able bring themselves to vote for that same effing Labour candidate that they weren’t able to bring themselves to vote for long before now. FG is doing alright but not spectacular and that any Enda problem is cancelled out by the candidates themselves. That the votes the Greens lost in 2009 aren’t coming back to them and so they’re going to lose worse yet they will be along with FF, for this election at least, more transfer repellent than SF was in the darkest days of the armed struggle. And then we have the latest People before Profit front, is this the front for the front of the Socialist Workers Party will attract some decent votes that might otherwise have gone to SF? But barring the vote that the main contenders will get based on their own local track record we don’t see that the ULA candidate in Roscommon will be bothering the count for long.

When it comes to independents, lots of people like the idea of an independent until they got a close look at the actual independents that are running for the people who want a Jackie Healy Rae type in Dublin South then Shane Ross is not the man for them as vice versa.

The list of candidates will be finalised on Feb 9th but we will outline a few constituencies in the next 24hrs in advance of that to give a flavour of what we think is likely to happen at this point and give you an idea of what we do. Feel free to link, tweet, or email the contact details around. We can be emailed but we don’t do requests, this isn’t Larry Gogan.