It's just over five months until the next Assembly election, and there's a lot of speculation that the winds of change could be about to blow across the house on the hill. We'll know for sure, of course, somewhere on the 6th or possibly the 7th of May, but recent opinion posts do seem to suggest a clear direction of travel. So, with all the usual caveats in place concerning margins of error, snapshots in time and a week being a long time in politics, never mind five months, we thought it might be interesting to crunch a few numbers on this week's red line. Slugger O'Toole's Deputy editor David McCann is with me, as is the data analyst Peter Donaghy. Welcome to both of you. David, can we say for sure that change in some

shape or form is coming? Yes, I think we can. I mean, polls have been pretty, an election results

themselves. We've had a number of them since the 2017 assembly election have pointed that there

has been a shift in the electorate. Now, the bit that interests all of us

is the degree to which how much, and that change seems to be going very much toward the Alliance Party.

You know, most estimates and even conservative estimates show alliance gaining at least three seats

at the next election at their peak around about seven or eight. So the key question

for the next Senate election seems to be is how much damage will alliance do to other political

parties? And the bit that we're trying to work out is how much and will that be towards the higher

end or the lower end? Yeah. Okay. And that's a very interesting thing. We'll try and tease apart

during the course of this conversation.

Peter, give us a sense of the scale of speculation here, first of all.

Would you?

What can we safely speculate about and what do we need to be cautious about?

As you say, there's a lot of uncertainty with this election.

I think it's probably going to be, you know, certainly

one of the most, most hard to predict and unpredictable sort of in living memory. I think as far as

Northern Ireland, assembly elections go. I think that certainly the DUP are going to be pleased,

certainly with the momentum that they seem to have gotten since they are absolutely perfect

polling numbers, certainly a few months ago.

It does seem like they've kind of maybe steady the ship and they are now beginning to kind of like

make inroads again. And certainly a few months ago it might look like, you know, the idea of

...