Assessing the pollsters

The excellent UK Polling Report have a piece entitled "EU elections: How did the pollsters do?" and it makes interesting reading. The conclusion is that

"YouGov performed the best - both their polls in the final week were closer than any competitor, with average errors of 0.83 and 1.23. Second were Populus, who slighly overestimated Conservative and UKIP support, but otherwise performed well with an average error of 1.57

ICM’s average error was 3.16 - this was down to them overestimating Lib Dem support and underestimating UKIP support. As regular readers will know, ICM do tend to produce higher levels of Lib Dem support than other pollsters do, however, in this case I don’t think the error in predicting the Lib Dem vote is part of a wider problem with ICM’s method - rather, I think it’s down to the way ICM and Populus asked the question of how people would vote. ICM prompted with just the main three party names, and then gave supporters of “other” parties a second list of prompts. Populus included minor parties in their main prompt. The results suggest Populus’s approach works better with phone polls (though YouGov’s increased accuracy compared with their 2004 performance suggests it’s the other way round online!)

ComRes’s final poll was furthest out, with an average error of 3.56. Their final poll before the election underestimated Conservative support, and severely overestimated support for Labour and the Green party (for whom the poll was carried out)."

I was reminded of this when I saw the front page of today's Independent newspaper proudly proclaiming that "Johnson would deny Tories outright victory". The piece based on a ComRes poll purports to show that

"Alan Johnson would deny David Cameron an overall majority at the next general election if Labour ditched Gordon Brown and installed him as prime minister, according to a new poll for The Independent.... Under Mr Brown's leadership, the Conservative Party would win an overall majority of 74, according to ComRes. But if Mr Johnson, the Home Secretary, replaced Mr Brown, the Tories would be six seats short of a majority in a hung parliament – raising the prospect of a deal between Labour and the Liberal Democrats to keep the Tories out. Mr Johnson is the only one of eight possible Labour leaders who could prevent an outright Tory victory. Under Jack Straw, David Miliband, Jon Cruddas, Ed Balls, Harriet Harman, James Purnell or Mr Brown, Mr Cameron would win a majority of between 10 and 94, ComRes found. Significantly, Labour would do better under Mr Straw, Mr Miliband, Mr Cruddas and Mr Balls than under Mr Brown. "

It is interesting that even if this ComRes poll was close to the truth (and see above for ComRes's recent performance) the most optimistic result for Labour would be a hung Parliament and Labour having to beg a deal from the LibDems to stay in power.

The truth is that Gordon Brown is a busted flush as Prime Minister, he is despised and ridiculed in equal measure by much of the UK population and it is only the BBC and his spin team keeping the worst of his errors from the public that allows him to have any degree of credibility. Imagine how Gordon Brown would be viewed if his nose-picking, his You Tube video, his "Obama Beach" speech and his being boo'd at the D-Day commemorations were allowed to be broadcast by the state broadcasting service - the BBC. The BBC's pro-Labour bias is an affront to democracy in the UK and needs to be urgently addressed.