Loyal Reader Jeremy got in touch to ask us the following question:

"I read an article is the Guardian claiming that Labour was on course for huge gains in seats and votes, is this a fair assessment when those figures don't account for the seats they already hold that formerly belonged to Coalition?"

It's an interesting question indeed. When covering elections it's important not just to cover the raw numbers, but to understand the meaning of those numbers. When we want to analyses the history of a Parliament that has changed from 650 seats, to 100 seats, and now to 150, it's more useful to consider the percentage of the overall Parliament each party's seats represent.

The Guardian's projection is reprinted below.

The Guardian's projection based on predictive modelling of recent polling.

The Guardian claims that "no party in the simulation's history has won that many seats". While this is true, it's somewhat of a misleading figure.

The transition to 150 seats is a relatively recent change, and assuming Labour had the same proportion of seats under a 100 seat parliament, they'd have 37 seats. While that is impressive, the Conservatives would have them beat with 40 seats in September of 2017. It is fair to say that the absolute number of seats is the largest since 2014, but that's not representative of the weight those seats actually have.

The Guardian also does not consider the impact of the merger into Labour by the Coalition party. Coalition achieved 20 seats and 23% of the total national vote in the last election.

If we include Coalition votes in the figure, this projection actually suggests the merged Labour party will lose just over a fifth of it's votes compared to the combined Labour and Coalition totals. The article implies the current Labour seat count to be 36, but it is actually currently 65. Therefore this projection actually predicts a loss of 9 seats, rather than a gain of 20.

None of this is to be held against Model-Raymundo or Labour as a whole, indeed to hold such a significant amount of voters after a merger of two fairly distinct parties is an impressive accomplishment. It's just that without the right figures in front of us we can get a confused picture of political events, and that's in no one's interest.

While this projection does predict a good result for Labour, it's very important to consider that in the context of what Labour and Coalition! achieved apart in the last election, rather than solely considering Labour as if the merger never happened.