Zero to 100: Are pollsters ready for the UK general election?

A summer general election took the country by surprise earlier this month, with polling stations set to open on 4th July. Are polling firms ready? Five pollsters tell us about their preparations.

polling station sign on a wall

James Crouch, associate director and head of policy and public affairs, Opinium
With the exception of 2015, polling firms have always been at the mercy of the prime minister’s choice of the date to call a general election. That being said, the calling of a general election will always spark an intense round of activity for polling agencies.

In the run-up to an election year, we put a lot of effort into planning. We assess what might be different about an election held in 2024 compared with one held in 2019. We then have to make a judgement about which elements of our methodology to adjust to take account of that. This might include new weighting targets, grouping responses according to new constituency boundaries, or even finding ways we can streamline our survey design to maximise participant experience during an intensive period of fieldwork.

The challenge comes from the implementation of all these preparations only being possible once you know when the date of the election is. Some last-minute changes are inevitable or only relevant once a campaign has got underway. For example, our final methodology for the campaign will only be implemented from the beginning of June. All changes need to be tested and validated. The key is to have the ability to do this in a very short time window and make sure it’s right first time.

Ben Shimshon, co-founder and chief executive officer, Thinks Insight & Strategy
Despite knowing it was going to be an election year, last Wednesday’s announcement still came as a surprise. It’s an exciting time, with a few projects going on hold for the pre-election period, and others being ‘activated’ by the PM’s soggy statement.

We'll be advising clients closely on developments over the coming weeks – helping them interpret the tsunami of polling in the right way and keeping a close eye on how some of the more novel approaches to vote intention polling are playing out. We’re also going to be doing some really innovative longitudinal work across the campaign, blending a number of cutting-edge platforms to get a real-time picture of how the debate is playing out for voters across the country.

Anthony Wells, head of European political and social research, YouGov
There are still a substantial number of people who voted Tory in 2019 saying ‘don’t know’ when asked how they will vote. A large amount of the difference in leads between different polling companies is because of different choices in how to handle that.

Some companies choose to model or predict how those people will vote come election day, while others report only what people currently say. It is as much a philosophical decision as anything else. Are we measuring how people say they will vote, or predicting how we think they will vote?

Either way, it is reasonable expectation that the differences between pollsters will narrow in the lead up to 4th July as the number of people saying ‘don’t know’ falls. However, whether that results in a narrowing lead or not depends on to what extent, if at all, those voters return to the Tory party.

Chris Hopkins, political research director, Savanta
I think very few people were seriously anticipating a July election, so many of us in the industry have had to fast forward plans we had hoped to spend our summers on. That being said, lots of fundamentals at Savanta have now been in place for a long time, and this short period is about finalising things before we enter the full heat of the campaign. Coming out of the local elections as the most accurate polling company for both London and West Midlands Mayoral elections, we feel we’re in a strong place.

I see two big issues for polling companies this election. The first is that we have significantly increased in number, with more noise making it more difficult for the public and journalists to distinguish good research from bad. The second is our current spread – with big discrepancies in Labour’s lead among reputable companies. I think that gap will close in the coming weeks, but it makes it harder for others to understand.

Craig Watkins, UK chief executive officer, Verian
All organisations will have had a plan for the campaign, ready to go once the election was called. However, few expected it to be called for summer, so there may well have been some scrambling to get up and running and particularly to make sure their experts are in place for the full five weeks.

Technically, I think the focus will be on ensuring coverage of the occasional voters who provide 15 to 20% of the votes in every general election. They don’t follow politics much outside of election periods and they also don’t usually seek to take part in election polls: it is a serious challenge to represent them properly. We’ll be using our own specialist social research panel Public Voice in an effort to do meet this challenge.

There will also be renewed focus on how to judge the likelihood that a respondent will vote and what to do when a respondent withholds critical data about their voting intentions or is otherwise undecided. There is not a uniform approach to this so we can expect some quite varied results early on (although they may converge later in the campaign as voters start to firm up their intentions).

Lastly, I’d expect a plethora of multiple regression with poststratification (MRP) from different organisations, and these will take more of the limelight than the data they are built from. The big question is whether the proportional swing that most MRPs are predicting for this election actually comes to pass.

We hope you enjoyed this article.
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