I’ll eat my hat if these political polls are on the money
MUCH excitement last week as two large polling exercises were published. The first, the MRP Election Projection, was conducted by YouGov and showed what the pollster expected to happen in each individual seat across the whole of the UK.
The second was a Scotland-only poll by Ipsos Mori giving information on public attitudes to each political leader, support for independence and voting intention.
There has been a dearth of polling relating directly to Scotland so far in this Election campaign, so two big pieces of work dropping in quick succession sent commentators into overdrive.
The reaction from the political parties across Scotland was more muted, however. And there’s good reason for that.
Polls capture national trends. When a polling company says it expects a party to win X number of seats, what it has done is look at which seats are currently held by which party, how close the result was last time, and then decided whether, if a party increases or decreases its last result by how much their national poll rating has gone up or down, they would still hold it.
There are weightings and algorithms and calculations, but basically that’s it. It’s a blunt tool.
In Scotland, where only two MPs have the comfort of a fivefigure majority, most seats are very, very close.
In tight races, many of which have particular local issues that inform voting patterns, the idea of a uniform swing is nonsense.
No political party with any degree of professionalism is using a poll that comes out a fortnight before an election to provide them with any actual information. That is because parties are miles ahead of the pollsters in knowing what voters are doing – both nationally, and in individual seats.
Last week’s Ipsos Mori poll, for example, questioned 1,046 adults aged over 16 across the whole of Scotland – all 59 seats. However, the parties themselves are out knocking on doors and, by this stage in the Election campaign, will have spoken to double, triple or quadruple that number in every single key seat (either one they already hold and are defending, or one they hope to take from an opponent).
And these are people who actually have a vote – are over 18, a UK, Commonwealth or Irish citizen (but not EU) and who the parties have checked actually appear on the electoral register.
They also have records from previous elections to determine if a vote has changed.
THE candidates and their teams also know the different issues that people in their area are making a decision on. So, for example, the big MRP poll predicted that the Conservatives would lose the East Renfrewshire seat they hold, by 1 per cent, to the SNP.
This prediction is based on how the national swings will affect both parties’ votes. But the MRP model does not take into account the huge competing forces here.
In the two referendums, twothirds of people in the seat voted to stay part of the United Kingdom, while three-quarters wanted to remain in the EU.
A lot of the pro-UK vote in 2017 went to Labour, as the party fielded a candidate who had run the Better Together campaign and marketed himself as the man ‘who saved the Union’. He is not the candidate this year. East
Renfrewshire is also the Scottish seat with the largest Jewish population – who have expressed deep concerns about Labour antisemitism and Nicola Sturgeon’s offer to help put Jeremy Corbyn into 10 Downing Street.
Both Tory and SNP canvassers agree the Labour vote is collapsing. The way it breaks will decide the seat, but will not be subject to a universal swing as the conditions here are so unique.
Similarly, recent polls suggesting the SNP will cling on to North East Fife – a seat held by only two votes in 2017 from the Lib Dems. I will do a Paddy Ashdown and offer to eat my hat if the Liberals don’t take the seat handsomely.
Pro-UK voters have both the taste and hang of tactical voting.
It’s what allowed the Conservatives to unseat SNP big beasts such as Alex Salmond and Angus Robertson last time around and what is now putting pressure on the SNP’s Westminster leader, Ian Blackford.
No pollster will pick up the huge Liberal swings in Ross, Skye and Lochaber and the East Neuk, nor the big Conservative boosts in Argyll, Hamilton or Ayr.
But come election night, such seats are worth watching.