Political predictions were always tough. Now they are even harder. Just as the oracles of ancient times relied on astrological charts and mediums swear by crystal balls so modern day delphics have come to depend on opinion polls.
But 2015 was the year when opinion pollsters bombed. This makes political forecasting for 2016 all the trickier.
If it had been up to the opinion polls then Ed Miliband would now be Prime Minister, Jeremy Corbyn would be an obscure back bencher and ex-Prime Minister David Cameron would already be on the second draft of his autobiography, perhaps entitled Pearls Before Swine!
In a sense the disrepute in which the polls are now held is unfair because it’s always been wrong to present them as predictive as opposed to being just a static, and often retrospective, snapshot of opinion. On the other hand when times were good the pollsters were keen enough to claim god-like infallibility. They must now therefore expect people to point to their feet of clay.
While opinion polls in the UK have now become as rare as hens’ teeth, elsewhere they are still in great demand. In the good old USA there seems to be a presidential primary poll every 10 minutes or so.
However, the failings of last year’s UK election polls are a reminder that, when making predictions, a little bit of thought and common sense is often better than a lot of measurement and quantitative analysis as Keynes once said “it is better to be broadly right than exactly wrong.” So by applying a bit of such nous we can arrive at a forecast as to this year’s likely winners at the polls in the United States, in the United Kingdom and in Scotland.
So let us start with the presidential race. According to the polls, Donald Trump is the runaway winner of the Republican nomination and by the same indicators has a good shot at becoming president of the United States.
However, my guts tell me that is nuts.
Instead, I think Hillary Clinton will become the 44th, and the first female, president of the US by the year end.
Meanwhile, the biggest UK political event on this side of the Atlantic will not be an election but the referendum on membership of the European Union. Cameron wants to have it sooner rather than later. However he has lost control of the timing of the poll which lies in the hands of our European partners in terms of the negotiations.
The referendum will likely be in the autumn, in September before the clocks change, and my forecast is for the “Ins” to beat the “Outs” in a pretty tight race.
At that point there shall be no further purpose in David Cameron staying on as Prime Minister. Having already said he is stepping down before the next election, why would he stay on as a duck, becoming lamer by the day?
The opinion polls say that his best pal, Chancellor George Osborne, is odds on to follow in his footsteps but I doubt it. There is always a great political danger in being the sidekick of the sheriff and my hunch is that the Tories will rally behind a figure who represents, or can be presented as, a change in direction.
Boris Johnson looks too risky so the smart money should be on someone like Home Secretary Theresa May distant enough from the Prime Minister to represent change but close enough not to totally upset the applecart. If the Out campaign defies the odds (and my forecast) and wins the referendum then Cameron’s time will be up anyway and Osborne will be discredited with him. The Tories would then need to turn to a credible outsider, someone untainted by Europe but without the swivel eyes of some of the Europhobes.
In this case then David Davies, the hugely impressive libertarian MP for Haltemprice and Howden and the man Cameron pipped for the Tory leadership, might get an unexpected late run at the top job.
Closer to home the polls have Nicola Sturgeon as the overwhelming favourite to be re-elected as First Minister. Indeed she has as big an opinion poll lead in Scotland as Donald Trump has among Republicans!
Polls can change of course. At this exact point in the electoral cycle five years ago Iain Gray had a 15 point lead over yours truly and the Scottish political press corps were confidently predicting a clear Labour victory. In the event the SNP won the 2011 election by more than 15 points.
However, in this year’s case common sense is working with the opinion polls not against them.
The Scottish election will boil down to who most people want to be First Minister. The answer to that question will be overwhelmingly for Nicola and not her political rivals thus her re-election is a confident prediction.
But securing an overall majority in Scotland’s proportional system is no shoe-in. It is a big task for SNP activists this year.
So there we have it. Without relying on any poll my prediction is that the UK will stay in the European Union but Cameron will soon be out of Downing Street. For political leadership in America, the UK and Scotland we could be heading for an all-woman clean sweep of Clinton, May and Sturgeon!