Like Ed Miliband, pollsters also suffered a severe defeat last week. Far from the dead heat which the national opinion polls had predicted for months, David Cameron won by a heavy margin. But how did the pollsters get it so fundamentally wrong? Especially, when just yesterday, even Cameron thought a Conservative majority was near impossible.
After the exit polls blew months and months of pollsters’ predictions out the water, it became clear that the Tories had been radically underestimated. We thought that the race couldn’t be any closer but we were in fact wrong. In the words of Cameron himself, “I’ve often said that there’s only one opinion poll that counts and that’s the one on election day and I’m not sure that’s ever been truer than today and tonight”.
To sum up, the Conservatives have now won 37 per cent of the vote, followed by Labour with 31 per cent, Ukip with 13 per cent, Lib Dems with eight per cent, and SNP with five per cent. None of the polls anticipated a conservative lead anything like this and not one mainstream polling projection predicted the Tories to win much more than 290 seats. In spite of this, they have now won a staggering 330 seats.
And while Labour was predicted to win roughly 270 seats, they have taken home a meager 232 seats. In failing to win key target seats in the North-West, Yorkshire and the Midlands, the swings that Labour so desperately needed slipped away from them. In spite of their dramatic failings to predict the Conservative and Labour share of the vote, it’s worth noting that the polls did accurately predict the share of the vote for the Lib Dems, Ukip, SNP and Greens.
All the same, the polls certainly failed to predict the extent of the Liberal Democrat bloodbath that has ensued. After claiming that they would be the “surprise success story of the night”, Nick Clegg has suffered a humiliating defeat and the Lib Dems have held just eight of its 56 seats. What’s more, none of the polls could’ve predicted the long list of eminent Liberals who have taken a farewell bow. As incumbency and local strength failed to save them from national collapse, Vince Cable, Charles Kennedy, Danny Alexander, Ed Davey, Simon Hughes and Lynn Featherstone have all lost their seats. In turn, the Conservatives – the second party in most Lib Dem seats – have been in the prime position to profit from Lib Dem losses.
Simon Atkinson, the global chief knowledge officer at Ipsos Mori,has expressed surprise at the Lib Dem collapse: “The expectation was that they’d hold the seats with their key players but they haven’t. If they had got below 20, I would’ve said it was a terrible night for them, but now they’ve got below 10. No matter how famous or high profile you are, it won’t save you”.
But the question remains on everyone’s lips – where did the so-called experts go so wrong? The truth is, polling is only ever as precise and accurate as its last error. The scope for inaccuracy always remains. And while, more polls were carried out in this election than ever before, voting intentions will still never equate to an actual tick in the ballot box.
Tom Mludzinski, head of Political Polling at ComRes, admits that, saying:
Polling companies have to be humble enough to say we’ve clearly missed the mark on the Conservatives and Labour. We’re not arrogant enough to say we’re done so let’s move on; instead we need to review our systems and consider where we went right and where we went wrong. It was never as close as we all believed”.
While, the pollsters might all be clinging onto the fact that they were in their three per cent margin of error, it goes without saying, that they vastly underestimated Tory support. The opinion polls haven’t got it this wrong since 1992 and it’s time for questions to be asked. Is the late swing towards the Tories an issue of turnout – a question of who voted and who stayed at home? Or can it be blamed on the “don’t know voters” or disorganized Labour voters or “Shy Tories”?
With large numbers of Tory voters historically hiding their voting intentions, the phrase “shy Tory” was first coined in 1992, when pollsters wrongly predicted the election result. While the polls had shown Labour and the Tories to be neck and neck, the Conservatives won by eight points. Although pollsters have adjusted their methodology accordingly, perhaps modifications have been flawed and created new errors. After all, we still know surprisingly little about the “shy tory” – who are they, why are they so shy, and why are they still confusing pollsters?
Whatever the answer, it is clear that the core Conservative vote is far more resilient than the core Labour vote as Labour voters are far more likely to stray to Ukip, Greens, and the SNP. On top of this, the increasingly fluid nature of the British electorate means people are far less likely to identify with one single political party than they did in the past. Whatever the answers to these complex questions, it is clear that the polls have radically failed to predict the voting intentions of the British electorate. And if pollsters do not fundamentally reevaluate their methods, who will ever trust an opinion poll again?
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