I am going to stick my neck out and say it’s going to be Boris by 58 seats. How do I reach that conclusion? Because the pollsters have a problem with estimating the Labour vote. And this time it is their turn to over-estimate it. In 2010 the final polls put Labour on between 27 and 29 per cent – against the 29.7 per cent which Gordon Brown actually achieved. In 2015 the last polls put Ed Miliband between 33 and 35 per cent – compared with the 31.2 per cent he actually achieved. All polls converged on predicting either a dead heat or a Tory lead of 1 per cent – except, that is, for a Survation poll the day before the election which predicted a Tory lead of 6 per cent, remarkably close to the 6.6 per cent lead which gave David Cameron his majority of 15. The only problem was that this poll was not published because the pointy-heads at Survation didn’t believe it – they thought it was a rogue poll.
Their fingers burned by the experience of 2015, polling companies adjusted their methodologies, with the result that in 2017 they horribly under-estimated the Labour vote.
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