This Rafael Behr piece about the Oldham by-election has been getting the bird, not surprisingly given the central prediction was hopelessly wrong. The really interesting bit, in my view, is that if we take a maximally charitable view and assume that there is nothing outside the text, so everyone he spoke to in Oldham who expressed an opinion is mentioned and is quoted accurately…well, he had all the information he needed to call it correctly.
We hear from “Rob”, who apparently voted UKIP at the general election but is going to “lend” Labour his vote this time. That is to say, he’s going to vote Labour. “Jo” is also going to vote Labour. We also hear from “Warren”, described as a “UKIP supporter”. We don’t actually hear whether he intends to vote or not, so we can’t weight him by likelihood to vote, but let’s be conservative and score him a strong K-for-Kipper. We also speak to someone who describes Jeremy Corbyn as “just another liar” and refuses to vote, and a ‘kipper who says he’s not going to vote.
Someone else says Jeremy Corbyn is an idiot and needs to get his act together, but doesn’t say which way they might vote or if they will vote. You might say it probably won’t be Labour on the strength of their remarks, but if you asked me I’d say much the same, and I would have voted Labour.
Either way, we’ve got 2 Labour votes with a full turnout weighting, 1 UKIP vote with a full turnout weighting, two people who aren’t going to vote and whose opinions are therefore zero-weighted, and someone who might do pretty much anything. On the night, 2.69 Labour votes were cast for each UKIP vote, so this micro-poll was actually pretty good. Apparently, Rafael Behr is a fairly effective device for generating randomised population samples!
Or maybe not, as none of his respondents has a name implying South Asian ancestry. But that in itself is interesting; it tells us that the UKIP fantasies of vast numbers of fake postal votes from Those People are just that, fantasies, or rather, excuses. If the white population broke 2.x to 1 against UKIP, they were always on a hiding to nothing, because they just didn’t have the votes, and too many of their supporters were popping off general crankiness rather than seriously proposing to do anything.
This would have been a great story, of course. But such was the power of Behr’s preconceptions, the mere fact that he met twice as many people who actually intended to vote Labour as he did ‘kippers doesn’t seem to have passed through his mind en route from memory to keyboard.
Daniel Davies has formed the opinion that Behr is the worst opinion former currently practicing in the UK. I’m not so sure. This piece on Tories taking an interest in Ed Miliband’s ideas about the economy is not only good, it also appeared in the paper on the morning of George Osborne’s autumn statement, seriously prefiguring the Ozzer’s U-turn so big it was more a Gefechtskehrtwendung. Either that was a very good prediction, or else Behr has a high-quality Treasury source.
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