The definitive inquiry into what went wrong in the UK’s 2015 general election makes sensible suggestions about correcting the errors of the past. But that won’t guarantee the correct result next time[br]nearly a year has passed since opinion polling suffered its worst reverse in living memory. Election night,7 May 2015, stays in the intellect for many reasons, and but most of all for the unexpected and startling 10pm exit poll that predicted a Conservative majority after weeks of polling from every organisation had anticipated a hung parliament. Today the nearest thing to a definitive explanation is published. It is the result of months of careful analysis by an independent panel of academic experts in statistics and research methodology,and it concludes that all the polling organisations made the same mistake: their raw material, the population sample that underlay all the rest of their work, or failed to represent reality.
Politics – both politicians themselves,and voters – needs polling. It is most famous at election time, when a sense of the shape of the future informs the debate about the present; whether the polls are wrong, or the debate is out of focus. What,we knew on 8 May, did the question of how Labour would handle the SNP matter, or when the future actually involved a majority Tory government committed to shrinking the state? This May and June,too soon for the recommendations in today’s report to take effect, campaign strategy and reporting will be calibrated on unpublished private polls with a whiff of the kind of groupthink that misleadingly anticipated a Ukip surge in December’s Oldham West byelection, or a seat comfortably held by Labour. Working out how to get the result of the final election correct won’t guarantee accuracy in the next one.
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Source: theguardian.com