Labour pains

As readers will be aware, I’m a Labour voter (usually) and the Labour result is one that’s not filled me with hope.  There will be much argued about where they went right and wrong, both in Govt and the campaign, but we’ll leave that for elsewhere.

As I write, Labour have 5 seats and are in the hunt (with varying degrees of hopefulness) for 4 further seats, and it appears (slightly) odds on they won’t make 7 in the new Dáil (unless they come to some arrangement with the SocDems or e.g. Zappone).

Worth noting that this day last week,  when projecting their performance in the Sindo/Millward Brown (poll=6%, seats=5) I stated the following;

“The couple of points LP are lower compared to RedC sees them miss out on a rake of seats (indeed falling short of the 7 required to be a Dail party), suggesting there is a very big tipping point for them between 6-8%… if they are about 7% on the day (quite possible on current polling) I suspect they will be involved in a lot of dogfights.  If they fall as low as this on polling day, this could be the last time the party contests an election (at least in its current form), as consideration of a re-alignment of the centre-left would surely arise if both they and the SocDems were below that threshold.  But we’ll see.”

This is pretty much what happened, although whether you draw the same conclusions is up to you.

On the day, they have received 6.6%, and while they may yet reach 7 seats, the issue of re-alignment of the centre left will probably remain.  Interestingly, this was below the 2 exit polls, which gave 7.1% and 7.8% – those margins may not seems much, but the seat projections for them were 7 and 11, so 5-9 (tending to 6) is around what you’d expect for 6.6%.

Looking at the projections I made over this series  (since I returned in December) that were under 8%, the seats projections were as follows (remember interactions with other parties also influence);

4% – 1

6% – 5

6% – 5

6% – 7

7% – 9

7.1% – 7

7.5% – 11

7.8% – 11

So  5-7 seats at 6% (averaging 6.3), 9 seats at 7%, and 7-11 seats in the space between 7 and 8%.  Quite where 6.6% is going to land is still uncertain but currently at 5-9 (looking like 6-7), it looks like it will end at the upper end of the 6% range.

That’s all for this post, back off to look at the Dublin Bay figures – I’m had Labour at about 35% chance (AOR) and 20% (KH) last night, but want to look at them again now I’m sober…

D