Re: The UK General Election Thread (II)

[LeFromage]

Harris Poll for the Daily Mail:

Tories 33%
Labour 24%
Lib Dems 32%

Tories 33-34% against a desperate government that's been at the helm for 13 years is absolutely pathetic

Their opposition for that 13 years has been similarly pathetic, so it's not like it's a major surprise.

It's their own fault for arrogantly assuming that they'd get in by default simply by just hanging around and waiting for Labour to fall out of favour, rather than coming up with - and being frank and open about - some decent policies.

Bringing back fox hunting? Tax breaks for millionaires? Yeah, that's what the average voter is crying out for...

They'll still squeak in, by hook or crook, because when push comes to shove, a lot of wavering voters will play it safe and go for the established opposition. But there you go - that's British politics for you.

[Allan D]

Someone with the surname Balls could never be a serious candidate, surely.

That would be like when the Liberal Party in Australia was looking like having Tony Abbott and Peter Costello as a leadership team...

We have had a Prime Minister Ball (not Balls) before as John Major's father's original name was Tom Ball and he added Major to become Major-Ball in deference to his stage act with his first wife which he called "Drum and Major" and eventually dropped the 'Ball':

Tom Major-Ball

[LeFromage]

The internal fight to be next leader has already begun.

Got to be between David Millipede and Alan ' I like expelling our autistic people to the US' Johnson.

I've seen some mention Ed Balls. FFS, really? Got the charisma of a Chris Tavare

I think people would find Milliband fairly palatable. Seems a fairly sensible young chap, won't look like a burst bin bag on television, can smile without it being harrowing for anyone within a five mile radius.

Johnson would be as useless as a leader as he is a Home Secretary.

[Allan D]

Labour only got 34% after 13 years of Tory government in 1992 as well as being in the middle of a recession. Only difference was that they were 7.5% behind the Tories rather than being ahead.

[eowyn]

[JKLever]

The polls tonight have the Tories coming back towards the pack rather than extending their lead towards 38%

CON 34%(-1) LAB 28% (+1) LDEM 29% (+1) - Yougov
CON 33%(-3), LAB 28%(-1), LDEM 28%(+1) - ICM

[LeFromage]

Prolly Tory boys with a couple of seats majority would be my guess. They're making noises about going it alone as a minority government should they fall short, too.

So, back to the 80s we go...

[Gary 111]

Its not really their decision if they fall short though is it...?

[JKLever]

Its not really their decision if they fall short though is it...?

Exactly. Watch how fast Clegg has a love in with Labour... there's a potential farking nightmare lurking somewhere. I've thought about Milliband and Johnson which would at least be palatable but just remember who is Labours deputy PM. Harriet farking Harman FFS...

[Basil]

Anyone for a second election this year?

[Basil]

Anyone for an election night drinking game?

[LeFromage]

"Aye, I'll gi' it a go..."

[horace]

Its not really their decision if they fall short though is it...?

Exactly. Watch how fast Clegg has a love in with Labour... there's a potential farking nightmare lurking somewhere. I've thought about Milliband and Johnson which would at least be palatable but just remember who is Labours deputy PM. Harriet farking Harman FFS...

tories always always have a born to rule philosophy...move on ...nothing to see here

[DJ_Smerk]

Anyone for an election night drinking game?

This has potential, and I'd be up for it.

[G.Wood]

As if you need a reason to insert mind altering substances into your person

[beamer]

Its not really their decision if they fall short though is it...?

Exactly. Watch how fast Clegg has a love in with Labour... there's a potential farking nightmare lurking somewhere. I've thought about Milliband and Johnson which would at least be palatable but just remember who is Labours deputy PM. Harriet farking Harman FFS...

Surely they would realise that giving us another unelected PM would destroy the credibility of both parties? And after the inevitable breakdown of the coalition we would end up with a Tory landslide and/or a big boost for fringe parties.

[CT]

so who is going to win ???? all I read here is gobledygook

[Merlin]

UK General Elections are, as a rule, gobledygook ... especially when it comes to pre-election polls, some of them taking "samples" from 1000 people out of an electorate of some 43 million.

[JKLever]

UK General Elections are, as a rule, gobledygook ... especially when it comes to pre-election polls, some of them taking "samples" from 1000 people out of an electorate of some 43 million.

1,000 gives a good sample Merls - see this from ukpolling

4) They only interview 1000 people, you’d need to interview millions of people to make it accurate!

George Gallup used to use a marvellous analogy when people raised this point: you don’t need to eat a whole bowl of soup to tell if it is too salty, providing it is sufficently stirred a single spoonful will suffice. The same applies to polls, providing an opinion poll accurately reflects the whole electorate (e.g, it has the right balance of male and female, the right age distribution, the right income distribution, people from the different regions of Britain in the correct proportions and so on) it will also accurately reflect their opinion.

In the 1930s in the USA the Literary Digest used to do mail-in polls that really did survey millions of people, literally millions. In 1936 they sent surveys to a quarter of the entire electorate and received 2 million replies. They confidently predicted that Alf Landon would win the imminent US Presidential election with 57% of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes. George Gallup meanwhile used quota sampling to interview just a few thousand people and predicted that Landon would lose miserably to Roosevelt. In reality, Roosevelt beat Landon in a landslide, winning 61% of the vote and 523 electoral votes. Gallup was right, the Digest was wrong.

As long as it is sufficent to dampen down sample error, it isn’t the number of people that were interviewed that matters, it is how representative of the population they are. The Literary Digest interviewed millions, but they were mainly affluent people so their poll wasn’t representative. Gallup interviewed only a few thousand, but his small poll was representative, so he got it right.

[Allan D]

Great minds think alike, JK, I was just about to post the whole thing so will do anyway:

1) The polls are ALL wrong, the real position is obviously X

Er… based on what? The reality is that opinion polling is pretty much the only way of measuring public opinion. We have some straws in the wind from mid-term elections, but they tend to be low turnout protest votes, don’t tend to predict general election results and are anyway quite a long time ago now. Equally a few people point to local government by-elections, but when compared to general election results these normally grossly overestimate Liberal Democrat support. If you think the polls are wrong just because they “feel” wrong to you, it probably says more about what you would like the result to be than anything about the polls.

2) I speak to lots of people and none of them will vote for X!

Actually, so do pollsters, and unless you regularly travel around the whole country and talk to an exceptionally representative demographic spread of people, they do it better than you do. We all have a tendency to be friends with people with similar beliefs and backgrounds, so it is no surprise that many people will have a social circle with largely homogenous political views. Even if you talk to a lot of strangers about politics, you yourself are probably exerting an interviewer effect in the way you ask.

3) How come I’ve never been invited to take part?

There are about 40 million adults in the UK. Each opinion poll involves about 1,000 people. If you are talking about political voting intention polls, then probably under 100 are conducted by phone each year. You can do the sums – if there are 40,000,000 adults in the UK and 100,000 are interviewed for a political opinion poll then on average you will be interviewed once every 400 years. It may be a long wait.

4) They only interview 1000 people, you’d need to interview millions of people to make it accurate!

George Gallup used to use a marvellous analogy when people raised this point: you don’t need to eat a whole bowl of soup to tell if it is too salty, providing it is sufficently stirred a single spoonful will suffice. The same applies to polls, providing an opinion poll accurately reflects the whole electorate (e.g, it has the right balance of male and female, the right age distribution, the right income distribution, people from the different regions of Britain in the correct proportions and so on) it will also accurately reflect their opinion.

In the 1930s in the USA the Literary Digest used to do mail-in polls that really did survey millions of people, literally millions. In 1936 they sent surveys to a quarter of the entire electorate and received 2 million replies. They confidently predicted that Alf Landon would win the imminent US Presidential election with 57% of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes. George Gallup meanwhile used quota sampling to interview just a few thousand people and predicted that Landon would lose miserably to Roosevelt. In reality, Roosevelt beat Landon in a landslide, winning 61% of the vote and 523 electoral votes. Gallup was right, the Digest was wrong.

As long as it is sufficent to dampen down sample error, it isn’t the number of people that were interviewed that matters, it is how representative of the population they are. The Literary Digest interviewed millions, but they were mainly affluent people so their poll wasn’t representative. Gallup interviewed only a few thousand, but his small poll was representative, so he got it right.

5) Polls give the answer the people paying for it want

The answers that most clients are interested in are the truth – polls are very expensive, if you just wanted someone to tell you what you wanted to hear there are far cheaper sources of sycophancy. The overwhelming majority of polling is private commercial polling, not stuff for newspapers, and here clients want the truth, warts and all. Polling companies do political polling for the publicity, there is comparatively little money in it. They want to show off their accuracy to impress big money clients, so it would be downright foolish for them to sacrifice their chances with the clients from whom they make the real money to satisfy the whims of clients who don’t really pay much (not to mention that most pollsters value their own professional integrity too much!)

6) Pollsters only ask the people who they know will give them the answer they want

Responses to polls on newspaper websites and forums sometimes contain bizarre statements to the effect that all the interviews must have been done in London, the Guardian’s newsroom, Conservative Central Office etc. They aren’t, polls are sampled so they have the correct proportion of people from each region of Britain. You don’t have to trust the pollsters on this – the full tables of the polls will normally have breakdowns by demographics including region, so you can see just how many people in Scotland, Wales, the South West, etc answered the poll. You can also see from the tables that the polls contain the right proportions of young people, old people and so on.

7) There is a 3% margin of error, so if the two parties are within 3% of each other they are statistically in a dead heat

No. If a poll shows one party on 46% and one party on 45% then it is impossible to be 95% confident (the confidence interval that the 3% margin of error is based upon) that the first party isn’t actually on 43%, but it is more likely than not that the party on 46% is ahead. The 3% margin of error doesn’t mean that any percentage with that plus or minus 3 point range is equally likely, 50% of the time the “real” figure will be within 1 point of the given figure.

8 ) Polls always get it wrong

In 1992 the pollsters did get it wrong, and most of them didn’t cover themselves in glory in 1997. However, lessons have been learnt and the companies themselves have changed. Most of the companies polling today did not even exist in 1992, and the methods they use are almost unrecognisable – in 1992 everyone used face-to-face polling and there was no political weighting or reallocation of don’t knows. Today polling is either done on the phone or using internet panels, and there are various different methods of political weighting, likelihood to vote filtering and re-allocation of don’t knows. In 2001 most of the pollsters performed well, and in 2005 they were all within a couple of points of the actual result, with NOP getting it bang on.

9) Polls never ask about don’t knows or won’t votes

Actually they always do. The newspapers publishing them may not report the figures, but they will always be available on the pollsters’ own website. Many companies (such as ICM and Populus) not only include don’t knows in their tables, but estimate how they would actually vote if there was an election tomorrow and include a proportion of them in their topline figures.

[Gary 111]

That's all well and good but it is impossible to completely remove bias from polls. I have noticed in this election that the right-wing Murdock papers consistently have Cameron 2 or 3% higher than the other papers.

Then sometimes you have the effect of people threatening to vote one way, but when it comes down to it staying with their traditional party. No one would admit to voting for Major in 1992, but they did.

[beamer]

No one would admit to voting for Major in 1992, but they did.

And 5 years later none of them made the same mistake again... the Tories would probably have recovered more quickly had they lost that one narrowly rather than hanging on to be annihilated in 1997.

I've always thought Brown could snatch a Major-style result under similar circumstances - people not being convinced about the alternative (i.e. Cameron, as was the case back then with Kinnock). The difference of course being the rise of the Lib Dems, meaning an outright majority is very unlikely, but I wouldn't rule out Labour as largest party in terms of seats.

[JKLever]

Miliband in to 5/4 from 7/4 to be next Labour leader.

Really starting to think that unless the Tories get a majority, Libs wont support Brown if he comes 3rd in a share of the vote and Miliband will be PM - albeit another unelected PM and someone who didn't stand in the debates.

[Allan D]

Seems a lot are hoping against hope that Gordy can stay in No.10 through some deal with the Lib Dems. Obviously gluttons for punishment. In 1992, after 13 years of Conservative government, over 1m more people voted than had voted in the previous General Election of 1987 to give the highest turnout (77.7%) in any UK General Election for 18 years.

John Major's Conservatives broke the record for the largest number of votes cast for a single party beating (by 150,000) the total cast for Attlee's Labour Party in 1951. If the national shares of the vote had been reflected in a uniform national swing Major would have had a comfortable working majority of 50 or 60, thus nullifying the later problems he was to have over Maastricht and the reduction in his Parliamentary strength due to bye-election losses (for the last year of Major's government it was effectively a minority one sustained only by the support of Northern Irish Unionists).

The fact that he ended up with a majority of only 20 was due to Labour out-performing in marginal seats mainly as a result of Lib Dem-Labour transfers (the Lib Dem vote, as compared to the Alliance vote in 1987, fell by 1,300,000 whilst Labour's vote rose by 1,500, 000 however the Lib Dem vote, at just under 6m, remained sufficiently large to deny Labour an improbable victory with a much smaller share of the vote).

In 1997, after 18 years of Conservative government, almost 2 1/2m fewer people voted in the lowest turnout in a post-war General Election (a dubious record that was to be broken in 2001 when almost 9 1/2m fewer people voted). Sounds as if there was far more enthusiam for John Major, even in the middle of a recession, than there ever was for Tony Blair.

Now, after 13 years of NuLabour, you think Gordy should stay in office with, on the basis of the current polls, a lower share of the vote than that achieved by Michael Foot (27.6%) in 1983? Doesn't sound very democratic to me.

[Gary 111]

Its quite simple Allan, less people vote if the result is already a foregone conclusion. Tony Blair was clearly going to win in 1997 and 2001 so less people could be bothered to vote.

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