Never has the phrase “a week is a long time in politics” been truer than during the past few months in the UK. A new prime minister has taken office, Parliament has been prorogued and Brexit has continued on its rocky path.

Since January, BBC Future has been hosting You Predict the Future: Brexit and Beyond, a forecasting challenge with innovation foundation Nesta. We have been inviting our readers to take part in predicting the outcomes of everything from alternative meats and hurricanes to Brexit and the European elections. Following our July 2019 update of how the forecasters have been doing, here are our latest results from the challenge.

More like this:

On 23 May 2019, the UK took part in the European Parliamentary elections, which went on until the 26 May 2019 around Europe and saw the UK elect 73 MEPs across the regions. Participants were asked two questions about the election:

“If the UK participates in European Parliament elections, what percentage of votes will the Brexit Party win?

If the UK participates in European Parliament elections, what percentage of votes will Change UK win?”

(Since this question was published, Change UK’s name has been changed to The Independent Group for Change.)

Both questions were open to forecasters from 3 May until 22 May 2019. On the date of closure, forecasters put the likelihood of the Brexit Party getting between 30% and 35% of the national vote at 33%. Forecasters appeared confident that the Brexit Party would gain a substantial proportion of votes – they gave the party a 12% chance of gaining less than 20% of the vote.

Once votes were counted and announced, the Brexit Party won 31.6% of the vote share, giving them 29 MEPs.

In other words, our forecasters were spot on, correctly predicting the outcome of the election for The Brexit Party on the eve of the UK’s vote.