… So where did our cousins go wrong?
First, I believe they were operating on the wrong level of analysis. Their data were on one level and what they were trying to predict was on another. The polls were looking at the percentage of the national vote each party was earning, while analysis and reporting emphasized the number of seats each would receive in Parliament.
The whole U.K. polling enterprise is akin to predicting the number of House seats each U.S. party will get using only the generic vote. CONT.
Mark Mellman (Mellman Group), The Hill