HOW DO ORDINARY PEOPLE define fake news? Isabella, a woman we spoke to as part of a research project, explained that, for her, “fake news” is simply “news that you don’t believe is real.” She continued, “this guy has got one story, [that one] has got the other story, you […] Read more »
The End of the Left and the Right as We Knew Them
By now it has become quite clear that conservative parties in Europe and the United States have been gaining strength from white voters who have been mobilized around issues related to nationalism — resistance to open borders and to third-world immigration. In the United States, this development has been exacerbated […] Read more »
Young and old are voting very differently in the U.K. and U.S. That’s a big deal.
Last week’s British election illustrated one of the most remarkable developments in recent elections: the propensity of younger generations not only to vote but also to vote overwhelming for older socialist leaders advocating left-wing economic policies last fashionable during the 1970s. This cleavage between younger and older voters seems to […] Read more »
UK general election: How we correctly called a hung parliament
As the dust of the general election settles, many commentators are still stating they didn’t see it coming. But we did. By using our unparalleled panel and sophisticated data analytics, we created an election model using an advanced statistical technique called MRP (which stands for multilevel regression with post-stratification). We […] Read more »
Polling Matters podcast: UK GE17 debrief. Breaking down the YouGov model.
This week’s podcast is split into two parts. In part one, Keiran chats with Ben Lauderdale from the LSE. Ben was behind the infamous YouGov model which turned out to be so successful. He explains how the model works, what it tells us about the campaign and British politics more […] Read more »
Why almost all the UK election predictions were wrong
Predictions were confounded again in last week’s election, and this time in the opposite direction from 2015. My forecast, along with almost everyone else’s, proved some way off the mark. The main error was in the national vote shares, rather than translating that into seats, and there was a specific […] Read more »