WHY POLLSTERS DON’T UNDERSTAND VOTERS
The surprise victory of Britain’s Conservative Party in the election last Thursday (5/7) was a grave embarrassment to all 11 of the UK’s biggest pollsters, who predicted the Tories would lose narrowly, or barely eke out a win.
"In all my years as a journalist and strategist, I’ve never seen as stark a failure of polling," said David Axelrod, President Obama’s campaign guru, who advised the Labour Party ("labor" spelled the Brit way). Axelrod, you’ll enjoy hearing, returned to the US humiliated by his own failure.
The Conservatives gained 28 seats for an absolute majority of 331. That means Prime Minister David Cameron can follow through on his pledge to hold a referendum on British participation in the European Union. British withdrawal likely would doom that corrupt socialist monstrosity, to the benefit of freedom loving people everywhere.
The Labour Party lost 24 seats to fall to 232. The Liberal Democratic Party, partner of the Tories in the coalition government, was demolished, plunging to 8 seats from 56.
The Tory victory was all the more surprising because the much more conservative United Kingdom Independence Party tripled its support from 2010 to finish third in the popular vote. But because its support was so spread out, the party lost one of its two seats.
The Scottish National Party, which got 4.7 percent of the popular vote to UKIP’s 12.6 percent, won 56 seats. If Britain had proportional representation, as do most European countries, UKIP would have won 83 seats.
The SNP’s gain came at the expense of Labour, which lost 56 of its 58 seats in Scotland. The emergence of the SNP – which seeks independence for Scotland – is the most significant result of the election. It could mean the end of the United Kingdom.
I won’t join the handwringing over that. We shouldn’t let nostalgia cloud our view. Britain hasn’t been Great since the defeat of Winston Churchill’s government in 1945.
Borders shouldn’t be sacrosanct. Much needless strife in Africa and the Middle East, for example, would be ameliorated if borders drawn for the convenience of European colonialists were redrawn to reflect the interests and desires of the people who live there.
The United Kingdom was forged mostly by force, against the will of most Scots. An amicable separation – like that between the Czech Republic and Slovakia – may be in the best interests of both.
Important issues – chiefly the status of British military bases in Scotland and sharing of revenue from North Sea oil – would have to be worked out.
Separation would reduce the burden on English taxpayers. Nearly 90 percent of Scots receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes, the Tory party leader in Scotland said in 2012. And English conservatives likely would dominate for the forseeable future elections in not-so-great Britain.
The British election was just the most recent surprise for pollsters globally, who badly underestimated Likud’s strength in the Israeli election March 17; badly underestimated how well Republicans would do in the 2014 midterm elections.
The surprises continued last Tuesday (5/05). A week after a poll for the Detroit Free Press predicted it would pass, a referendum to raise the sales tax in Michigan was rejected by 80.1 percent of voters – the worst defeat ever.
Republican Daniel Donovan got 58.9 percent of the vote – 10 percentage points more than his support in the only poll – in a special election in New York’s 11th Congressional District.
Statistician Nate Silver offers four methodological reasons for why polls have been so far off.
Pollsters could be overestimating turnout among low information voters, playwright Roger Simon thinks.
Pollsters got the election result so wrong because the Left (which dominates the news media) "has browbeaten ordinary voters into being reluctant to share their real views," said London Telegraph columnist Janet Daley.
People "prevaricate and evade when asked how they will vote because they are intimidated by the condemnation of the Left-wing mob," she said.
Leftist scolds dominate the news media as much here as in Britain. GOP Senate candidates last fall ran about 4 percentage points better than pollsters predicted, Mr. Silver noted. If Mr. Simon and Ms. Daley are right, Democrats could be in for a nasty surprise in 2016. Let’s certainly hope so.
Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration. He is the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette