Pollsters blow British election, now on suicide watch

Good day all. Last week the British went to the polls to elect a new government. According to the polls, it was going to be very close, and that the current Prime Minister, David Cameron, would have to build a coalition government again at best, or that Labour would win big and cause all sorts of problems.

That isn’t actually what happened. The British Conservative Party, (Tories), won an absolute majority allowing David Cameron to form a government with no assistance from other parties. This is not what the polls were saying, right up to the end. Here are a few details from NewsMax:

Members of Britain’s Labour Party may be licking their wounds after suffering a resounding defeat in Thursday’s elections, but they are not alone — Friday’s results handed pollsters their worst performance since 1992, when Conservatives defied forecasts by winning a narrow parliamentary majority.

Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, admitted the polling firms had got it wrong. “What seems to have gone wrong is that people have said one thing and they did something else in the ballot box,” Kellner told The Telegraph.

But it could have been worse. “We are not as far out as we were in 1992, not that that is a great commendation,” Kellner said, while adding that politicians would be wise to “campaign on what they believe” and “should not listen to people like me and the figures we produce.”

He who lives by the Polls, Dies at the polls, and the Labour Party has been euthanized. The article continues on with various pollsters trying to come to grips with their complete and total collapse. They can’t understand what went wrong. You would think that after several elections in the United States that they missed by a country mile, not to mention the recent Israeli election, they would start looking at what they are doing wrong. Some are.

“The most obvious problem for all forecasters was that the polling average had Labour and the Conservatives even on the night before the election. This was not just the average of the polls; it was the consensus. Nearly every pollster’s final poll placed the two parties within 1 percentage point of each other,” said Silver’s colleague, Ben Lauderdale, in a post explaining what went wrong with their estimates.

The word in there is “Consensus.” There was one poll that was taken that hit the results right on the nose. I heard about it while listening to the Howie Carr show on my drive home from my Real World Job yesterday. (And this is why I can’t produce links. Radio in a car isn’t the internet) The polling firm couldn’t believe the results and consider it an “Outlier,” meaning that it was probably wrong. It went against the consensus that the Tories were going to get slaughtered at the polls.So, they didn’t release the results and now they have a number of eggs on their face.

The Guardian newspaper’s data editor, Alberto Nardelli, admitted he lacked a sufficient explanation of what went wrong with the polling.

I can give you a hint. The Guardian makers the New York Times look like a mouthpiece for the Tea Party.

“It could be simply that people lied to the pollsters, that they were shy or that they genuinely had a change of heart on polling day,” he said. “Or there could be more complicated underlying challenges within the polling industry, due, for example, to the fact that a diminishing number of people use landlines or that Internet polls are ultimately based on a self-selected sample.”

I think they lied. I know I have. In fact, I make a point of lying to pollsters on general principles, much like Bun-bun will go after telemarketers wherever and whenever he finds them. People are sick of polls and flat out don’t trust them. This is why polling companies keep getting blindsided. So, what do you think? Take out poll and let the world know what you think.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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