… In the United Kingdom’s general election, Prime Minister Cameron won on a vision of a dynamic, competitive Britain as a land of future opportunity for working families. Miliband was promising them only a return to the past: 1970s-style rent control, re-nationalization of some services, and energy price controls were, […] Read more »
Right-Wing Wins Come at Too High a Price
… Not since 1886, the press widely reported, has a sitting party increased the number of seats and vote share as the Conservatives just did. Nearly every public poll reported a dead-even contest between Labour and the Conservatives. How could British pollsters have gotten it so wrong? Just two months […] Read more »
Election polls face a crisis of confidence
A series of recent high-profile misses by election polls in several countries has sent the worldwide polling industry into one of its moments of doubt and self-examination. … Although each of these misses can be explained, and polling in multiparty parliamentary elections is more fraught with challenges than America’s mostly […] Read more »
The failure of the polls in Britain
… 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 […] Read more »
UK: We got it wrong. Why?
… We got the election wrong. So did the other ten polling companies who produced eve-of-election voting intentions: we all said the race was too-close-to-call. Only by admitting that we are all at fault can we start the journey to finding out why. That journey’s first stop is 1992. CONT. […] Read more »
What Else We Got Wrong In Our U.K. Election Model
With the benefit of a few more days to examine the data — and a lot more hours of sleep — we can make a few additional points about what went wrong with our U.K. election forecasting model. CONT. Ben Lauderdale (LSE), FiveThirtyEight Read more »