… U.K. elections have been tough to forecast in recent years. The 2016 Brexit vote was a shock to many, although the polls suggested it would be close. The last parliamentary election, in May 2015, was also a surprise: Public opinion polls and academic forecasts predicted a hung parliament, but […] Read more »
Report card: how well did UK election forecasters perform this time?
Leighton Vaughan Williams, Nottingham Trent University When Theresa May announced on April 18 that she would call a snap general election, most commentators viewed the precise outcome of the vote as little more than a formality. The Conservatives were sailing more than 20% ahead of the Labour party in a […] Read more »
UK election: The day after
On 30 May, the YouGov model for the 2017 General Election was posted here and created a firestorm. At that time, most polls showed double-digit leads for the Tories and nobody else was suggesting that the Conservative majority was at risk. … In addition to the public skepticism, insiders in […] Read more »
The U.K. Election Wasn’t That Much Of A Shock
… The final polling average showed conservatives ahead by 6.4 percentage points. In fact, Conservatives should wind up winning the popular vote by 2 to 3 percentage points. That means the polling average will have been off by about 4 percentage points. … While a 4-point error would be fairly […] Read more »
Strong approval of Trump is fading across a number of demographics
FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver noticed something interesting in approval-rating polling for President Trump. While support for Trump has remained consistently high among Republicans and Trump’s base of non-college-educated white voters, the percentage of those who support Trump strongly has faded. In other words, while Trump voters still like him, fewer of […] Read more »
Gauging Public Opinion in the Age of Trump
… In The American Commonwealth James Bryce wrote that the “appetite for ‘highly spiced’ or ‘sensational’ news, is enormous,” and journalists sometimes work in “unceasing haste.” The media, he wrote, were an “index and mirror” of public opinion. But given citizens’ current distrust in the media, and the self-selection we […] Read more »