“On or about December 1910 human character changed,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote. On or about 6pm British time on Saturday, those putting their money on the line in British betting shops decided that the Conservatives would win an absolute majority of seats in Thursday’s election. They were prompted presumably by the five polls summarized here and here. And their analysis is presumably based not on uniform swingometers like http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/index.html this one, which shows Conservatives with 295 seats, 31 short of the 326-seat majority, but on the kind of analysis provided by the ingenious Nate Silver of 538.com, which I wrote about here and here, which suggests that Conservatives will do significantly better than that if the popular vote matches the average of these latest five polls.
