We ignore the polls at our peril

The dramatic announcement of the results of the exit poll at 10.01pm on Thursday 7 May 2015 has become one of those ‘Where were you?’ political moments. Anyone in politics can tell you what they were doing. Those at the heart of campaigns can recount the shock, horror, elation, silence, fist-pumping or cheers, depending on whose team you were on.

Those close to Ed Miliband were supposedly stunned into silence for several seconds. One Labour staffer at HQ said, ‘I looked round and saw rows of people all with their hands over their mouths. It was as if the whole room was witnessing some terrible tragedy unfold before their eyes.’ In studios, Labour members of parliament were told to parrot, ‘It looks wrong to us’ in the hope that that might be true.

But it wasn’t. Every opinion poll had predicted a hung parliament. So had the exit poll. The worst bit was still to come: the election delivered a Tory majority. The pollsters had got it wrong. However, it is a myth to suggest the result had not been predicted. Several people with direct insights into how to win elections predicted that a Labour leader playing to the left, banging on about mansion taxes, alienating businesses and trashing the record of the Labour government, was unlikely to win.

One such person, you may remember, warned that the election would be one where a ‘traditional leftwing party competes with a traditional rightwing party, with the traditional result.’ Some of us, who had heard again and again on doorsteps in marginal seats that our leader was ‘weak’ and had ‘stabbed his brother in the back’, and that he would ‘be pushed around by the Scottish National party’, were entirely unsurprised by the result.

The British Polling Council, the polling companies’ trade association, has conducted an inquiry into what went wrong, chaired by Patrick Sturgis of the University of Southampton. Last month’s provisional findings provide useful insights for polling companies, and terrible news for the Labour party. The headlines are that polling companies’ samples were not properly representative: they polled too many Labour supporters and not enough Tories, so the polls overestimated the levels of Labour support, creating the illusion we were heading for a hung parliament.

It is the reason for this disproportionality that should send a shiver down Labour’s collective neck. It was because an emphasis on telephone and online polling meant that over-70s, least likely to be online and most likely to vote, were missed out, and young people, most likely to be online and least likely to vote, were overrepresented. The lesson for the polling companies is simple enough: they need to sharpen their acts, create new methods of gaining a representative sample, and regain our trust. They can point to the facts that they got the result in Scotland right, and also the collapse of the Liberal Democrats.

The lesson for Labour is that policies and political messages aimed at the young, the disaffected and non-voters, predominantly transmitted via social media, are likely to reach people who will not, do not and cannot deliver a Labour government. And if you alienate and repulse the over-70s, who care about security, crime and the symbols of nationhood, you deliver a further five years of the Tories, again.

Will Labour pay heed? Unlikely. Instead, a much more pernicious myth has taken hold. It goes like this: the opinion polls are always wrong. They are paid for by the ‘mainstream media’. So we can ignore them. This is the line pedalled by Momentum supporters and the leadership cultists. Paradoxically, in these people’s eyes the polls’ bias in the left’s favour only confirms the mainstream media’s attempts to stitch Labour up.

The result is a delusional refusal to face the reality of the situation. When opinion polls appear which show Jeremy Corbyn to have the worst ratings of any leader ever, or that seven out of 10 voters do not trust him to safeguard national security, or that Labour voters increasingly think he is incompetent, or that the average Labour share of the vote is 31 per cent, compared to 40 per cent under Miliband at the same time, or that there is a remarkable increase in the number of voters seeing the party as extreme (36 per cent, up 22 points) and out of date (55 per cent, up 19), then the answer from the Corbyn camp is the same: the polls are always wrong.

The polls were wrong in 2015 in predicting the Labour share of the vote. But the polls since September showing Labour trailing the Tories on virtually every issue, rubric, measurement and question are not so wrong that they can be safely ignored. The margin of error, even on a ropey poll, is not 20 points. It is also more than likely that the polls still retain some pro-Labour bias.

Labour has spent the last five years wanting Britain to be Denmark or Sweden. The new leadership would like it to be Venezuela. Hard as it may be to acknowledge, you have to win the electorate in front of you. Polls are not accommodating the view of the ‘mainstream media’. They are signposts to where will end up. Ignore them, and another 10 years of Tory government beckons.

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