Everything pollsters could get wrong about the election
LONDON: In 2010, they couldn’t conceive of a coalition government. Five years later, they didn’t think the Conservatives would win a majority. Few made the right call on Brexit.
As they prepare for the June 8 election, Britain’s humbled political analysts point to the calls they have to make that could affect how accurately they predict the margin of victory, given the double-digit lead the ruling Tories have over the opposition, Labour.
Even though the headline result of a Tory win can be correct, they could miss the underlying story. Here are some of the dangers that lie in waiting for Britain’s pollsters.
TALKING TO THE WRONG PEOPLE
The probe into the 2015 polling disaster concluded that the main cause of the error was unrepresentative samples: Pollsters spoke to too many Labour supporters and too few Tories. But it warned this problem wouldn’t be easy to fix. “The pollsters have made methodological adjustments,” said Will Jennings, politics professor at Southampton University, and one of the members of the inquiry panel. “We won’t know until election day if they’ve fixed it.”
THE HIDDEN POWER OF APATHY
After the 2015 election and the 2016 referendum, “even people whose job it is to get excited about elections are fed up of elections,” said Robert Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University. He pointed to the 2001 election, another vote held in June where people felt they knew the outcome in advance. Turnout was 59%, the lowest since 1918. “Who stays home then becomes really critical for what happens,” he explained.
MISTAKEN ASSUMPTIONS
Turnout was one of the things that misled pollsters with Brexit, according to Joe Twyman, head of political polling at YouGov. “We were working on the assumption that habitual non-voters would not turn out,” he said. “And they did.” In 2015, it was hard for experts to believe polls predicting Labour would lose all but one of its seats in Scotland, one of its historic heartlands. Equally, the Liberal Democrats had in previous elections demonstrated an ability to hang on to seats they already held. So it was believed that they would again. But other electoral rules that people chose to ignore held true: Labour consistently polled badly on questions of which party had the best leader or would be best at economic management, and those proved an excellent predictor of the result.
THE BREXIT EFFECT
In Scotland, the 2014 independence referendum had the effect of realigning voters. The most important issue was now whether they identified as nationalists or unionists. Has Brexit done the same in the rest of the UK? If so, the Tories could pick up seats in the north of England that have always been Labour, but now identify as “Leave”, and the Liberal Democrats could take prosperous seats around London that feel “Remain”.
POLLS’ UNCERTAIN FUTURE
If Ms May maintains her lead up to June 8 and then Labour somehow wins, “then polling is stuffed,” Mr Twyman said. “No individual final poll in the history of postwar British polling has ever been more than 6% out. A miss of that scale would be the end.”