Why any pollster would be a fool to call the general election now
Ben Page
is chief executive of Ipsos MORI. Twitter: @benatipsosmori
Every general election is billed as ‘the most important for a generation’, or some such nonsense. And the result of every election seems utterly inevitable in retrospect but not quite so obvious before the polls have closed.
I’d like to claim that this time it really is different.
The word is that the Civil Service is preparing itself for a dizzy collection of possible outcomes: Conservative majority government, Conservative minority, Conservative-led coalition - and the equivalents for Labour.
So why is it so complicated this time? Well, partly because any conceivable outcome will be unprecedented in a different way:
- Six out of nine times since the end of World War II, when one party has had a small lead in the polls a year before the election, the other party has won (bad news for Labour)
- Only twice since voting began in the UK has an incumbent government increased its share of the vote after two years in office (bad news for the Tories)
- To win a majority, the Conservatives need a 10% lead over Labour, but Labour needs only a 2.8% lead over the Conservatives - because of the anomalies of the parliamentary seat boundaries (bad news for the Tories)
- Nobody has ever become prime minister after being as unpopular in polls as Ed Miliband is (bad news for Labour)
- Only three times (and not since 1931) has a party gone into opposition for one parliament and then come back to form a majority government (bad news for Labour)
- Despite having a more popular leader, and a big lead on the economy, the Conservatives remain much more disliked as a party than Labour (bad news for the Tories)
- The apparent collapse of Labour in Scotland and the post-referendum SNP surge mean Labour’s inbuilt advantage in Scotland is evaporating. But UKIP is meanwhile nibbling away at Conservative marginals in the South, where they lead everywhere except in London.
So should Nick Clegg take comfort from all this? Maybe not: only once before in history, in 1910, have there been two consecutive hung parliaments.
All of the precedents are all over the place. Almost whatever happens, it’ll be something new.
You’d be a fool to call it.
