They didn’t get their indyref 1 predictions right; and they didn’t get their UK General Election predictions right either – by a major distance.
Two weeks out, You Gov had the pro-indy campaign winning Indyref 1 51%-49%. On the night, the actual result was a win for the pro-Union vote, over 10% ahead at 55.6%.
This time the polls consistently agreed that Labour would have the largest number of seats and would be the government or lead a government.
Then came the exit poll.
This was a radically different poll for the situation south of the border; while it confirmed the the pre-vote poll predictions for Scotland which had been steadily within the margin for error.
Each case of error was founded on the same mistake – not reading the ‘don’t know’ returns intelligently; and with an additional factor at play in the General Election campaign.
The impact of the ‘cool’ and the ‘uncool’ on ‘don’t know returns
In the indyref campaign in Scotland it was – still is – ‘uncool’ to say you were /are pro-Union.
It was also for many, a potential lightning attractor. Very many were quite reasonably unprepared to put themselves at risk of abuse and worse by admitting to a preference for unity.
The blend of passion and ‘cool’ means that pro-indy voters had every incentive and no reserve about declaring their preferences to pollsters.
In an issue like independence, there would have been very few who genuinely did not know how they would vote. The majority of the don’t knows should have been weighted towards being pro-union preferences.
In this General Election the same type of situation obtained.
Aggravated by a genuine and longstanding bias to the left in the BBC and in many print journalists – even quite a few who write for centre left papers – those polled could not be unaware that preferring to vote conservative on any and on this occasion was – and is – ‘uncool’. Most people would not wish to present themselves to be seen as ‘dinosaurs’ or ‘right wingers’ so ‘don’t know’ is the natural home for what are now known as ‘shy Tories’.
Those preferring what is unquestioningly known as ‘a social justice agenda’ had the ease of being assured of the acceptability of their preferences and would again have had every incentive and no reserve in divulging it.
‘It’s the economy, stupid.’
It remains an unanswerable conundrum that the pollsters did not adequately factor in the truism produced in the campaign for the first Clinton presidency in the United States.
The astute James Carville, the Clinton Campaign Director, distilled his analysis of the key factor influencing actual votes into the phrase: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’
This message was given physical prominence in the campaign offices, so that no one on the team ever forgot that this was the overriding criterion for the Democrat prospectus to meet – and for the campaign team to hammer home.
A major reason why many voted for the SNP in the 2007 Scottish Election, bringing them to a minority government; and voted them again to their unprecedented – and systemically unintended – overall majority at Holyrood in 2011, was Finance Secretary, John Swinney’s ‘Steady as she goes’ steering of the budget.
Swinney kept it on an even keel and frightened no nervy passengers. [It would be interesting to know whether the cautious and canny Swinney is any more happy with First Minister Sturgeon’s opportunist ‘anti-’austerity’ cry than he was with First Minister Salmond’s frequent and spontaneous extravagant but unfunded promises during the indyref campaign.
It is amusing to note that Ms Sturgeon is now campaigning to have the Royal Mail nationalised from Westminster – to save the SNP having publicly to dodge its own unequivocal mad-hatter indyref 1 pledge by Mr Salmond to nationalise it in an independent Scotland.
In the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition, Chancellor George Osnorne has been the class act on the economy that gave the Conservatives their greatest strength at the polls.
This was underplayed in the party’s campaign and was forgotten about – or undermined by the Westminster Village journos. While generally you can cut an economy on a variety of cross-sections to prove almost anything you want to prove, the state of the UK economy was reassuringly free of looming crises.
While asymmetric aspects of it may have been advanced as banner headline scarecrows in anti-Conservative election campaigning, most people remained unconcerned.
The impact of this discoverable factor – known to be a core influencer of voting – does not appear to have been adequately factored into the modelling of the polls.
Next time?
The plethora of television debates – and the questionable utility of most of them puts their continuance under necessary question.
It may be time too to question the role of the publication of predictive polling during election campaigns, with the Exit Poll the only one assured of retention – because it is too late to influence voters and it has the best chance of being correct.
As such it adds interest to election night media coverage by providing a measure with which to gauge the reality – and particularly in the early hours where there is a paucity of declarations.
