"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety," argued Benjamin Franklin, despite his wise advice time after time surveys show that on civil liberties questions the general public prefer security over liberty. The Survation Policy Intelligence Unit (SPIU)
By-Election
The eve-of-poll Opinium constituency poll makes it a three way race with the Greens winning within the margin of error. Which means no-one really knows until the votes are counted. This analysis last night from the Mail on Sunday's Dan Hodges covers all bases: We will know soon
By-Election
Full Fact reported last week that "an advert shared by the Labour Party features energy secretary Ed Miliband claiming that the “real polling” shows that the upcoming by-election in Gorton and Denton is a “fight between Labour and Reform”. It also includes a bar chart, which shows Reform UK
projections
As we work on updating the database, dealing with edge cases and debugging the algorithm's outputs we're are now confident that our two basic models are working as expected. At this stage of the election cycle we are running two models - a conventional uniform national
We have had a long hiatus since the last general election, basically taking 2025 off. We're coming back for a new electoral cycle anticipating a more complex psephological landscape. Currently we're doing a lot of technical work, data hygiene, candidate uploading and bug fixing. So some
The Multilevel Regression with Post-stratification (MRP) model is nowadays seen as the gold standard method in modern political forecasting. It typically uses large national samples, analysing data on a constituency-by-constituency basis, the MRP poll predicts specific electoral seat outcomes, indicating which candidates are likely to win or lose. It can
Reform UK
As expected, the first poll that indicates that Reform is ahead of the Conservatives came last week, with YouGov placing Reform one point ahead of the Tories. Scarlett Maguire, Director of JL Partners, says 'It is an outlier, however, and the majority of polls, including ours, continue to place
Expert Panel
UK Polling Report is creating an expert panel to generate new insights about this election - and after. Please take our first short survey and be part of it! You will then get the results before everyone else and can help set questions in the future.
Algorithm
Just in time for the election we have overhauled our algorithm to fix the main complaint of followers. The algorithm hitherto applied national polling results to Scotland, this dramatically underestimated changes in support for parties in Scotland. We now apply much greater weight to Scotland specific polling versus national polling.
As the relaunched UK Polling Report approaches its first anniversary, we're looking to make some changes to the site in preparation for next year's general election. First of all, we need to prepare for the new electoral boundaries, adapting our database and re-engineering our models and
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