Late Thursday night, voters in the English city of Newcastle chose to remain in the European Union. Pollsters had predicted that voters there and elsewhere in Britain would have voted Remain by a considerable margin. In the end, Remain won by the tiniest of margins, taking 50.7 percent of the […] Read more »
Brexit polling: What went wrong?
… Had Yougov done well, I could use them as an example of the success of MRP, and political polling more generally, so I should take the hit when they fail. It looks like Yougov was off by about 4 percentage points (or 8 percentage points if you want to […] Read more »
Why the Surprise Over ‘Brexit’? Don’t Blame the Polls
… In a sense, the E.U. referendum joins a pretty long list of election forecasting errors. But this one was a bit different: It was not a cataclysmic polling failure. … If there’s a lesson here, it’s a fairly straightforward one: Don’t get too confident in contests when the polls […] Read more »
After Brexit and Trump, it’s time to stop trusting our guts and start trusting the polls
… We saw this during the Republican primaries. Donald Trump led poll after poll, but seasoned political observers simply refused to believe he would win. … And then, of course, he won. Brexit followed much the same path. Even as the polls tightened, elite sentiment remained confident. On the eve of […] Read more »
A study of Brexit
Investors around the world just bet billions on British polls. “A rally in European stocks Monday propelled the regional benchmark to its best daily percentage performance in nearly 10 months after polls showed support for the U.K. remaining in the European Union gaining ground,” MarketWatch proclaimed Monday. It’s a fascinating […] Read more »
Introducing the YouGov Referendum Model
There has been a lot of noise in polling on the upcoming EU referendum. Unlike the polls before the 2015 General Election, which were in almost perfect agreement (though, of course, not particularly close to the actual outcome), this time the polls are in serious disagreement. … In this article, […] Read more »