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 »
What We Got Wrong In Our 2015 U.K. General Election Model
No calculations are necessary to see that we missed badly in our forecast of the U.K. election. … The most obvious problem for all forecasters was that the polling average had Labour and the Conservatives even on the night before the election. This was not just the average of the […] Read more »
The 2016 Results We Can Already Predict
… In the current Electoral College battlefield, 40 of 50 states have voted for the same candidate in all four elections since 2000. And, of the 10 exceptions, three were fluky. . . . That leaves just seven super-swingy states: Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia, all of which backed Bush […] Read more »