The Mayo general election numbers game revealed
by Dr. Richard Martin
So who will be elected in Mayo on November 29?
That's the question on everybody's lips and we all have our own views.
But how does one determine who will be elected? How do you determine an accurate probability of success for any candidate?
I've meditated on this for some time.
Major gambling firms use the Betfair exchange to gauge the true price of an outcome.
When there is an event like the recent American election, where over €200 million changed hands on the exchange, the betting firms just take the odds from the exchange and add a 10% profit margin to the odds that end up on site.
There is no deep analytics or statistical research. They watch the money.
The more money that changes hands the more accurate the price that ends up on site. If the price changes on the exchange the price changes on the Ladbrokes site. It's very simple.
That's great. But the problem with this is the GE in Ireland and Mayo is such a small betting market that 'using' the Betfair Exchange as a guide towards the true odds/probability of someone being elected won't work.
Trying to gauge the outcome by canvassing and small talk on doors isn’t very scientific either. The seasoned canvasser knows the canvassing formula.
When you finish up for an evening after a few hours of calling on doors, you divide your promises by two and when you get home you divide them by two again. A promise made, a promise kept. Talk is cheap.
A savvy bookmaker is only interested in an accurate estimate of the true probability of an event happening and then assigning a price to the event. Really, what our friend the bookie is really after is your money. He wants to make a profit.
And the way to make money is to work out an accurate probabilistic estimate of who's going to be elected and then assign the market odds.
In my opinion, the best way to determine who will be elected in the upcoming GE in Mayo is to use the national opinion polls and recent local election results.
Currently, opinion polls on the POLITICO site are as follows: FG are at 25%, FF are at 20%, SF are at 18% and Independents are at 20%.
What is the total electorate in Mayo?
The boundaries have been changed to encompass the whole county. Previously the Cong electoral area was in Galway West, now it is part of the Mayo constituency again. In 2020, there were 2,444 votes cast in the area. The area itself has 11 polling stations.
There were 64,353 votes cast in the Mayo four-seater in 2020. If we were to add the 2,444 votes cast in Cong to the total valid vote in Mayo in 2020 that comes to 66,797 votes.
It's a reasonable assumption that the total valid poll will be roughly around 66,797 in a few weeks' time.
There were 66,502 votes cast in the recent local elections so anything between 66,000 and 67,000 should be the total valid poll. That being the case, the quota should be around 11,000 votes.
If you were to go by the current national opinion polls, FG should expect to get 16,700 FPVs. In the locals FG got 19,608 FPVs.
Splitting the difference, they would expect to get something in and around 18,000 FPVs.
There's one thing missing of course. The Ring effect. FG got 25,429 FPVs in the last GE. His vote was a personal vote. If you half his FPV and take 7,000 away from 25,000 you reach 18,000, which is around the figure I arrived at previously.
I think FG will reach between 18,000 and 19,000 FPVs in this coming election. FG are running four candidates.
How many candidates will they return to the Dáil based on those numbers? A definite two and a possible three. Dillon, Duffy and Jennings?
Going by national opinion polls, FF should expect to get 13,360 FPVs. FF got 17,278 FPVs in the locals earlier this year.
Split the difference and you arrive at 15,319 FPVs. The FF FPV total should be bounded between 15,000 and 16,000 votes.
There's no Ring effect to worry about here. FF are running two candidates. That should be enough to bring them both home.
SF should expect to get 12,024 FPVs based on national opinion polls and SF got 6,248 FPVs in the locals. Splitting the difference you get 9,136 FPVs. That's accurate. SF are running two candidates.
That's not a good idea. They could get one elected, but they won’t get two over the line. Gerry Murray could be ahead in the FPV.
He’s enormously popular in east Mayo, so it could cause the elimination of RCW. The problem they face is that they don’t have a foothold in a major urban area.
They are both from the geographical extremes of the county and Steven Kerr is going to attack them with ferocity in Ballina and Castlebar.
I don’t see a SF representative being returned to the Dáil. SF got 3,000 votes in Castlebar in 2020 and we got no return for it.
Kerr could pick up 1,500 of that bloc of votes. The working-class base is completely divided on the issue of immigration and SF must be praying for this GE to conclude so they can bunker down and regroup.
The Independents combined (I am including Aontú for the purpose of this analysis) are likely to pull anything between 15,000 and 16,000 votes.
There are four strong candidates in that block. O’Brien, Maxwell, Kerr and Lawless.
There will be no transfer pact between any of those candidates.
They will hurt all the candidates, but they will hurt SF the most.
The populist anti-establishment voting bloc is itself split.
This, I believe, will suit the establishment candidates.