On this week’s PB / Polling Matters podcast, Keiran speaks to Tom Mludzinski of ComRes about the firm’s polling among British Muslims earlier this year before speaking with Maria Sobolewska from the University of Manchester about her work looking at Muslim public opinion in the UK on terrorism and other […] Read more »
The Benefits of Random Probability Sampling: The 2015 British Election Study Face-to-Face
This post reveals the BES 2015 vote intention figures for the face-to-face survey and discusses them in the context of representativeness achieved via random probability sampling and efforts to interview hard-to-reach respondents. … Unlike almost every other pre- and post-election survey (including our own internet panel), the reported vote in […] Read more »
New research suggests why UK general election polls were so inaccurate
New research into May’s general election sheds light on what went wrong with the opinion polls, which notoriously all failed to predict David Cameron’s outright win. … The new study has significant implications for the ongoing British Polling Council postmortem into what went wrong, which is chaired by Prof Patrick […] Read more »
Sanders, Corbyn and the coming debate inside the Democratic Party
The election of Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing backbencher, as the new leader of the British Labour Party raises the inevitable question: Can it happen here? Can Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist senator from Vermont, capture the heart and soul of the Democratic Party? The immediate answer is, not likely. He […] Read more »
How did the pollsters get the British elections so very wrong?
The past 12 months have not been kind to political pollsters. Opinion polls have been well wide of the mark in the U.S. midterms, the Israeli general election, the Greek and Scottish referendums, and the British general election. The U.K. election was perhaps the most embarrassing of all. … In […] Read more »
Ron Pollard, a Pioneer in Britain’s Betting Industry, Dies at 89
You might not want to wager that the Loch Ness monster, which has made appearances either for real or in imaginations for centuries, was going to show itself indisputably any time soon. But as Ron Pollard understood, a fair number of people would make that bet. Mr. Pollard, a British […] Read more »