You Gov Poll

[scooping]

Extraordinary that today's poll shows May and Corbyn equal on 39 points when people were asked who would be the best prime minister. Compare that with his dismal ratings before and during the campaign.

[jim360]

It's hard to imagine what could have *possibly* changed since the last poll on this question. Must have been that one of them ran an utterly dismal campaign and demonstrated themselves as unfit for office...

[emmie]

Mrs May did herself no favours by running a bad campaign.

[sunny-dave]

Would that be JC then, Jim?

:+)

[scooping]

Agreed jim360. Just thought it was an extraordinary turnaround by Corbyn. Hope that thought is OK with you and Kvalidir.

[jim360]

Oh, absolutely. I'm on record on AB as having anticipated a Tory landslide, and even when the YouGov "hung parliament" poll came out I thought it an outlier, worth taking seriously on its own merits but probably unlikely. And I'm also on record as to how frustrated I was by Corbyn's leadership through most of his time. Turns out that he was able to turn it around, and I look forward to the next election in some hope that it will be a serious contest.

This election was about damage limitation for Labour -- or so I thought. Turns out that it's now about damage limitation for the Tory party...

[scooping]

Also curious that TV commentators have as yet to slam the pollsters. It's hardly the first time they've got it terribly wrong, the exit polls being the exception. With some other countries banning the publication of polls in the immediate run-up to the vote (publication, not polls themselves) might the British polls have effected the outcome of the election, even had a malign, distorting effect on the result?

[jim360]

I guess there's a few reasons for that: two polling companies, Survation and YouGov, essentially got the result correct in the end. The remainder did not, to be sure, but *this* time that was because they looked at the 2015 results, noted that a lot of likely Labour voters didn't turn out, and attempted to correct their raw data to account for this. So ComRes, for example, actually saw only a four-point lead for the Tory party in their final polls, but the turnout model "corrected" this to a 12-point lead. This time, turnout among Labour voters wasn't nearly so low...

So the polling companies had a mixed performance this time out, rather than a dismal one.

[EDDIE51]

How did 'the pollsters' get it so wrong?
Every poll I saw , and I looked every day, showed a large Tory lead gradually being eroded by Labour! The 'poll of polls' predicted a hung parliment on the final day which is exactly what we got!