Once I’d finished laughing about the election result – and, believe me, it took a good 20 minutes – it became apparent just how many old certainties had been upended. In the aftermath, many people have asked why journalists didn’t see the hung parliament coming. To which the first answer is: it’s not just journalists who didn’t expect these results. MPs, Momentum activists, almost all pollsters, and the leaders’ office were shocked by the exit poll too. Even Paul Mason, who predicted a hung parliament on Newsnight, did so with his “heart” while his head told him to expect a Tory majority. That doesn’t mean, however, that there is nothing to learn from this election. Here are ten lessons:
The assumption among political scientists is that while the media loves campaigns – the gaffes, the manifestos, the debates, the adverts – they only have a minimal effect on the result. That wasn’t true this time. The polls picked up a sharp narrowing of support for the Conservatives after the “dementia tax” fiasco. (Yes, the polls were wrong overall, because they were applying incorrect turnout filters to the raw numbers, but you would still expect them to detect changes from the initial baseline.) The YouGov model, which predicted the final result with eerie accuracy, had the Conservatives winning a 68-seat majority two days before their manifesto was released. So it’s entirely possible that the Conservatives really were heading for a solid victory for much of the campaign, and then binned the turkey in the last few weeks.
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