Will the British political pollsters redeem themselves in 2016?
As we are reminded in detail by David Cowling – a fellow student politician from my days in the late 1960s – in this piece for the BBC, the opinion polls were spectacularly wrong in predicting the result of the General Election in May 2015. Will they start to get it right in 2016? He writes:
“Within 24 hours of the election result, the British Polling Council launched an independent inquiry into the performance of the polls. Chaired by Prof Patrick Sturgis and assisted by colleagues such as Prof Jane Green, their conclusions will be made public in mid-January.
They will be looking closely at a number of possible explanations: late swing, shy Tories, lazy Labour voters, differential turnout, sample weighting and whether we are any longer able to contact representative samples of the population.”