And yet, the results should not have been all that surprising if one followed this year’s polling and the polling history of the U.K. closely. The final polling average showed conservatives ahead by 6.4 percentage points. In fact, Conservatives should wind up winning the popular vote by 2 to 3 percentage points. That means the polling average will have been off by about 4 percentage points. (The table below lists YouGov twice because they polled the race using two different methods.)
And yet, the results should not have been all that surprising if one followed this year’s polling and the polling history of the U.K. closely. The final polling average showed conservatives ahead by 6.4 percentage points. In fact, Conservatives should wind up winning the popular vote by 2 to 3 percentage points. That means the polling average will have been off by about 4 percentage points. (The table below lists YouGov twice because they polled the race using two different methods.) [...]
But while pollsters had middling results on the whole, some did much better than others. Indeed, the polls in the lead-up to this election showed a wide range of outcomes, with final polls showing margins that ranged from Labour +3 to Conservatives +13. There were a number of pollsters who had results very close to the final outcome, including Survation, Kantar Public, Norstat and SurveyMonkey. That’s far different than what occurred two years ago in the 2015 U.K. election, when all but two polls had the election within a narrow range between Labour +1 to Conservatives +1. That had been a sign of pollsters “herding” toward a consensus instead of behaving independently. [...]
There were also a lot of events during the campaign, but the compressed time frame makes them hard to sort out from one another. How much did the Conservative manifesto hurt the Tories? Did terrorist attacks in Manchester and London work against them? Was May’s perceived softness toward President Trump a factor, especially after Trump began to attack London Mayor Sadiq Khan? Given the results of the French election, is there an overall resurgence toward liberal multiculturalism in Europe, perhaps as a reaction to Trump? We don’t know the answers to these questions, although we hope to explore some of them in the coming days. We do know that elections around the world are putting candidates, pollsters and the media to the test, and there isn’t a lot they can be taking for granted.
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