POLITICO: …Political surveys do more than measure just the horse race: They help explain the issues and personal factors that help voters reach their decisions. But when public pollsters botch the horse race, it undermines credibility in the industry as a whole.
And it would be difficult for the pollsters to perform any worse than they did before Thursday’s vote in the U.K.: Most surveys and the prediction models based on them showed the Tories and Labour as about even, with a better-than-even chance that Ed Milliband, Labour’s leader, could assemble a coalition with the Scottish National Party to oust Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tory-led government. Instead, Conservatives won an outright majority, 331 seats to 232 for Labour, and Milliband resigned as opposition leader on Friday.
The differences between using polling to predict election outcomes in a two-party race in the United States and multiparty, first-past-the-post parliamentary systems like Great Britain are numerous. But changes in communications are threatening the viability of public election polling in many developed countries where the landline phone was once a reliable medium for representative surveys… (more)
