Ahead of the country going to the polls, Professors Will Jennings and Patrick Sturgis take a look at whether patterns of turnout – and how pollsters deal with it – could be the cause of another polling miss today.
They explain:
Turnout weighting, in other words, who turns out to vote and who doesn’t, is an essential component of accurate polling but there is no failsafe way of doing it.
The inquiry into the 2015 election polling concluded that, although the turnout probabilities used by the pollsters in that election were not very accurate, there was little evidence to suggest these were the cause of the polling errors. Might inaccuracies in the turnout weights be more consequential in 2017?
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