Nils Bohr, the Nobel prize winning physicist, once said: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Electoral forecasting, the science of predicting politics, is a case in point. It’s difficult to do and easy to get wrong.
However, it’s a fact that many people now want to know what England’s May 2023 local election results tell us about next year’s general election.
All forecasting relies on projecting information from the past and for most of the time polls measuring voting intentions are subject to a lot of inertia. This means we can use last month’s voting intentions to predict this month’s, as long as some unexpected shock does not come along to disrupt things.
