Translating polls into seats

There’s an odd disconnect at the moment. Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to predicts that the Tories will win 300 seats plus (the one exception was someone on the Union side who thought that they could hold the Tories to 280) but the polls show them winning significantly less than that.  

Now, this is partly because nobody is sure how you translate votes into seats in a three-way contest. People are also factoring in that the Tory vote is more certain to turn out and that the Tory operation is more confident that it knows where its voters are than the other parties. But it is a testament to how good people think the Tory field operation is that everyone has them getting more seats out of their voters than uniform national swing would suggest they would.

Tonight, we will get the final polls from the pollsters. I hear they’ll be eleven out.