Two post-mortems into the general election come out today: the pollsters’ examination of how their surveys got the election so wrong, and Labour’s latest internal inquiry into how it lost that election.
The first report, which is the preliminary findings of an independent inquiry set up by the British Polling Council and the Market Research Society, has more surprising information in it than the Beckett report which, when it it published later today, is expected to say that Labour lost because voters didn’t trust the party on the economy, leadership, or immigration. The pollsters seem to have succumbed to ‘herding’, which is when individual companies alter their sampling formulae to ensure they are producing results in line with those published by others in the same field. And those samples contained too many Labour voters and too few Tories.
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