How the polls have changed since 2015

Yesterday the British Polling Council had an event talking about how the polls had changed since 2015. This included collecting up data from all the companies on what they've done to correct the error and what they are now doing differently - all those summaries are collected here.

In looking at what's changed it's probably best to start with what actually went wrong and what problem the pollsters are trying to solve. As all readers will know, the polls in 2015 wrongly overstated Labour support and understated the Conservatives. The BPC/MRS inquiry under Pat Sturgis concluded this was down to unrepresentative samples.

Specially, it looked as if polls had too many younger people who were too engaged and too interested in politics. The effect of this was that while in reality there was a big difference between the high turnout among old people and the low turnout among young people, among the sort of people who took part in polls this gap was too small. In short, the sort of young people who took part in polls went out and voted Labour; the sort of young people who weren't interested and stayed at home didn't take part in polls either.

So, what have polling companies done to correct the problems? There is a summary for each individual company here.

There have been a wide variety of changes (including YouGov interlocking past vote & region, ICM changing how they reallocate don't knows, ICM and ComRes now both doing only online polls during the campaign). However, the core changes seem to boil down to two approaches: some companies have focused on improving the sample itself, trying to include more people who aren't interested in politics, who are less well educated and don't usually vote. Other companies have focused on correcting the problems caused by less than representative samples, changing their turnout model so it is based more on demographics, and forcing it to more accurately reflect turnout patterns in the real world. Some companies have done a bit of both.

Changes to make samples less politically engaged...

• ICM and YouGov have both added a weight by respondents level of interest or attention to politics, based upon the British Election Study probability survey. YouGov have also added weights by level of educational qualification.
• Ipsos MORI haven't added political interest weights directly, but have added education weights and newspaper readership weights, which correlate with political interest.
• Kantar have added education weighting, and also weight down turnout to the level they project it to be as a way of reducing the overall level of political engagement in their sample.

Changes to base turnout on demographics...

• ComRes have changed their turnout model, so it is based more on respondents' demographics rather than how likely they claim they are to vote. The effect of this is essentially to downweight people who are younger and more working class on the assumption that the pattern of turnout that we've seen at past elections remains pretty steady. ICM have a method that seems very similar in its aim (I'm not sure of the technicalities) - weighting the data so that the pattern of turnout by age & social grade is the same as in 2015.
• Kantar (TNS) have a turnout model that is partially based on respondents age (so again, assuming that younger people are less likely to vote) and partially on their self-reported likelihood.
• ORB weight their data by education and age so that it matches not the electorate as a whole, but the profile of people who the 2015 British Election Study who actually voted (they also use the usual self-reported likelihood to vote weighting on top of this).
• Opinium, MORI and YouGov still base their turnout models on people's answers rather than their demographics, but they have all made changes. YouGov and MORI now weight down people who didn't vote in the past, Opinium downweight people who say they will vote for a party but disapprove of its leader.
• Panelbase and Survation haven't currently made any radical changes since 2015, but Panelbase say they are considering using BES data to estimate likelihood to vote in their final poll (which sounds to me as if they are considering something along the lines of what ICM are doing with their turnout model)

In terms of actual outcomes, the pollsters who have adopted demographic turnout-models (ComRes, ICM and Kantar) tend to show larger Conservative leads than companies who have tried to address the problem only through sampling and weighting changes. We cannot really tell which is more likely to be right until June 8th. In short, for companies who have concentrated only on making samples more representative, the risk is that it hasn't worked well enough, and that there are still too many of the sort of young engaged voters who are attracted to Jeremy Corbyn in their samples. For companies who have instead concentrated on demographic-based turnout models, the risk is that the pattern of turnout in 2017 differs from that in 2015, and that Jeremy Corbyn's Labour really does manage to get more young people to come out to vote than Ed Miliband did. We will see what happens and, I expect, the industry will learn from whatever is seen to work this time round.