Vocal Voices

I think some serious questions have to be asked about the integrity of people who are conducting opinion polls. Neck and neck? The Tories beat Labour by 6%!

Peter Hitchens said that opinion polls today are being used not to reflect public opinion, but to try and influence it, and he's dead right!

Is it that, or is it that the people, when asked, simply play games with the pollsters? There's fundamentally a cynical streak in the English, you know .....

Opinion polls, carried out beforehand, I think reflected that a lot of people hadn't really decided.
The exit polls that I saw this morning were pretty accurate.

The very last opinion poles had a 1/6th undecided rate.

That is enough to give the 6% swing. Also there was clearly a lot of tactical voting. The big thing about a lot of polls is they don't show the credibility gap in undecided. Something which was becoming an art form in the Scottish Independence referendum.

The exit poll was even inaccurate in that it underestimated the strength of the Tory vote.

Whilst I'm sure there was a lot of influencing going on, I'm also sure that a lot of it backfired on them.

I see that the British Pollsters Council are to hold an inquiry into the methodologies and reporting procedures used by polling organisations. Survation apparently "chickened out" of publishing a poll showing the Tories with an eight point lead because it did not fit with other polls.

Personally, I would like to see polls banned in the final week of campaigning.

never understood the need or the point of them

how do pollsters know the answers they get are true?

Exactly, Mrs S was discussing that last night. She told me she was polled in Scotland and she didn't tell them a single word of truth. Her view was that she didn't want them to know how she was going to vote and she'd rather that people think about it for themselves. Personally I'd rather just say to them "No I don't want to be polled". But that's Mrs S.....

Personally I think they can be useful for people focusing their mind. So it might be that they have a really good local candidate but they really can't stand the party S/He represents. In the case where a party is going to be voted in to screw your life up for 5 years, the decision should be simple. The local candidate is the sacrifice....

It seems to me that Nicola Sturgeon gave the Tories this victory with her "fighting talk" and her incredible polling results. Simply put, the English decided that they didn't want some Scottish Gnome running their government and voted to make sure she didn't. A case where the polling actually changed the voting intentions of the people. In this case a good thing in the short term. Even if it does trigger Scottish independence in the long term...