Handing Over the Baton
Exactly a year ago I announced I was closing down UKPollingReport. I started running it back in 2005 - that was before I was a pollster, when I was an outside observer looking in. Then I joined YouGov and wrote about polling from working inside a company, but not actually doing the political polling. Then I joined YouGov's political team. And for the last four years I've run YouGov's political team.
It's rather wonderful when your hobby also becomes your job. You suddenly get paid for what you did for fun anyway. Then slowly it switches round, and one day you wake up and find that your job is also your hobby. That's not so good at all, you do really need a hobby outside work.
While it's no longer the role for me, the actual reasons I started writing UKPollingReport back in 2005 haven't really changed. Opinion polling is an essential part of democracy. Once every four or five years we find out what party people want to form the Government, but between elections opinion polling is, for better or for worse, the only real way we have of quantifying what the public think about issues of the day. If you think the people should have a voice between elections (and a voice that isn't just those who shout loudest or are most disruptive) polling is all there is.
Yet, we don't necessarily analyse it much or very well. They are numbers that appear in newspapers (or, these days, on social media) via some opaque process, that people tend to take at face value.
Seventeen years ago I thought I'd try to improve that, and try to explain a bit more how polls worked. About why the common criticisms (a thousand people aren't enough, no one asked me, pollsters are all biased) are bunkum, and the actual reasons why different polls sometimes showed different things (different weights, different turnout models, different questions). I did rather hope to encourage people to look a little more critically at polls. Not to dismiss them all - they are the most valuable tool we have to measure public opinion - but to understand what they can and can't do, what their shortcomings and strengths are, and perhaps interpret them a little more intelligently than just assumng those they agree with are correct, and those that tell them bad news should be ignored.
While I've stepped away from running the site, I still think there's a need for that. So UKPollingReport will be continuing... without me. I'm proud of what I did running the site for many years, but I won't be a back seat driver at all. It's in new ownership and under new management, and they'll be writing their own words, doing their own things and having their own opinions. But I hope they'll follow in much the same spirit that drove me originally and I wish them the best of luck.
An awful lot of what I wrote for seventeen years tended to be advising people to look at all the polls not just cherry pick the ones they agreed with, and not to get overexcited about movements in one poll, but wait till see if its a trend across more than one. I'll leave you with that same advice now. Oh, and for the record, agree disagree statements are still a terrible way to write public opinion surveys. With that, I leave you in Callum's safe hands.
