17/05/2026
We Trained a Machine to Predict Elections. Here's What It Found About UK Local Elections Sutton 2026
Most people looked at the Sutton 2026 local election results and saw a headline: Lib Dems win again. We looked at the same data and asked a different question can a machine learn the patterns behind those results, and use them to predict what happens next?
As a Full-Stack-Data-Alchemist
The answer is yes. Here's exactly how we built it, what the models found, and what it means for the next election.
Where the data scientist picks up
The data engineer's job ends when the warehouse is built clean tables, structured CSVs, a SQLite database ready to query. That's where the data scientist begins. We didn't collect a single new data point. Everything we used came directly from the pipeline the engineer already built, ward-level vote shares, 2022 baselines, declared results across all 20 Sutton wards.
The next task for our team is why and what next .
Stage 1=> Feature engineering
Before you can train a model, you have to give it something meaningful to learn from. Raw vote counts aren't enough. We built a 20-feature matrix one row per ward that included:
Vote shares for every party in both 2022 and 2026. Swing values (the change between elections). ONS deprivation index scores for each ward, sourced from the English Indices of Deprivation. Owner-occupier rates as a proxy for economic stability. A derived "right-vote split" column combining Conservative and Reform vote share because we suspected these two parties were competing for the same voters.
A Reform threat flag for any ward where Reform crossed 15%.
This is the part of data science that looks unglamorous but determines everything.
Most important bad features produce bad models, no matter how sophisticated your algorithm.
Stage 2 => Swing analysis
Before building any predictive model, you look at what actually happened and measure it precisely.
The single most striking finding Reform UK gained vote share in every single one of the 20 wards. Not most wards every ward.
The average swing to Reform was +14.9 percentage points.
In The Wrythe, it was +22 points.
In Sutton Central, +20.7.
Even in Worcester Park North a leafy, low-deprivation ward
Reform gained over 14 points where they had effectively zero presence in 2022.
Let me stop here. We are still training the data, and the machine is currently finding patterns between deprivation, voter turnout, and that Reform UK surge. Once we complete our model and validate the R^2 scores, we will be back with the full breakdown of the "Sutton Predictions".
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