The Labour leader Ed Miliband may have stumbled badly in the British election, but there was another big loser on Thursday night: the pollsters who were far off the mark and failed to see the outright majority won by Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party. …
Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams, director of the Political Forecasting Unit at Nottingham Business School, said that the failure of pollsters to authoritatively predict that Conservatives would win the most seats stood in stark contrast to the betting markets, which, he argued, had proved more reliable.
“If you really want to know a likely election result, ignore the polls and look at the betting markets,” he said. “It’s a mystery why pollsters are taken more seriously.” CONT.
Dan Bilefsky, New York Times