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 »
Nate Silver On Missed UK Forecasts: We Flubbed The Margin Of Error
Data guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com tells NPR’s Scott Simon how all the forecasts, including his own, were so far off in predicting the results of this week’s British election. NPR Read more »
Don’t trust those polls
I have been present for every British general election since 1987. This time, I could not understand how the incumbent Conservative coalition could have such positive policy results — low unemployment and high economic confidence — yet remain tied or even behind their Labor opponents in the months leading up […] Read more »
What on Earth happened in Britain? A WaPo polling guru weighs in.
On Thursday, what polls suggested would be a close race between Conservatives and Labour in the U.K. turned out to be a Conservative rout. We sat down with Scott Clement of the Post’s polling team to try and figure out why the final polls were so far off the mark […] Read more »
UK election 2015 polling: a brief post mortem
Our final call for the 2015 general election showed Labour and the Conservatives neck-and-neck, but the actual results gave the Conservatives a lead of around seven points. For any polling company, there inevitably comes a time when you get something wrong. Every couple of decades a time comes along when […] Read more »
British Election’s Other Losers: Pollsters
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 […] Read more »