… We got the election wrong. So did the other ten polling companies who produced eve-of-election voting intentions: we all said the race was too-close-to-call. Only by admitting that we are all at fault can we start the journey to finding out why. That journey’s first stop is 1992. CONT. […] Read more »
What Else We Got Wrong In Our U.K. Election Model
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 »
UK Elections: Voters were influenced by the politics of fear
… Judging by the results, which saw Labor secure barely 30 percent of the vote against 37 percent for the Conservatives, the politics of fear trumped the politics of inequality — despite significant increases in income inequality in Britain over recent years. Moreover, as both parties ran neck and neck […] 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 »