So, after an inquiry, they come to the conclusion we all came to before the election.
The failure of pollsters to forecast the outcome of the general election was largely due to “unrepresentative” poll samples, an inquiry has found.
The polling industry came under fire for predicting a virtual dead heat when the Conservatives ultimately went on to outpoll Labour by 36.9% to 30.4%.
A panel of experts has concluded this was due to Tory voters being under-represented in phone and online polls.
I think we can file that under “no shit Sherlock”. Given the vilification that the Tories receive in the press and elsewhere, and being “right-wing” is universally used as a form of derision and insult, can you seriously expect potential Tory voters to stick their heads above the parapet and face the wrath of the SJWs? No, they kept their own counsel and made their views known at the only poll that matters.
Labour supporters, on the other hand, like to telegraph their social justice and right-on credentials from the rooftops, because they are “good” and the Tories are “evil”. So, yeah, given all of this, I wasn’t remotely surprised by the outcome last May. The humiliating defeat of Labour and its subsequent descent into farce was merely a delightful titbit adding a warm afterglow.
Prof Patrick Sturgis, director of the National Centre for Research Methods at the University of Southampton and chair of the panel, told the BBC: “They don’t collect samples in the way the Office for National Statistics does by taking random samples and keeping knocking on doors until they have got enough people.
The ONS tried really hard to get me to do one of their surveys. Despite notes through the door and knocking on it – two years in succession – they went away empty-handed. I do not talk to pollsters, I do not do surveys. Ever. Nothing changes as a consequence of them. They area waste of time. Besides which, I take the view that my life is my business. If I want to tell folk what my opinions are, I’ll do it in my own time by my own means, not by answering tedious, impertinent questions from a pollster. Clearly, I am not alone…
I did a spell as a contractor many moons back at Nielsen Market Research.
The trick seemed to be to use ‘margin of error’ and ‘size of representative sample’ as the commonest excuses for getting it wrong
Basically you can say what you like as long as you add enough qualifiers…
My nephew did polling work for awhile. He was concerned about meeting targets and the time that it took to get responses from households that he had to visit several times.
I asked if others were having similar problems and anyway how did he get to these places.
He told me that he was dropped of by a driver who also did survey work. Remarkably the driver had no problem with his responses, everyone was completed ‘first time’.
“So what do you conclude from that?”, I asked him. I didn’t get an answer but I suspect that is why he stopped doing survey work.
Artificially building up support for Labour may have backfired.