The 2024 UK election campaign was dominated by discussion of the polls, from start to finish. This was partially because of the sheer volume of polls being published. We had more MRP (multi-level regression post-stratification) polls than ever before, many giving quite different pictures of the size of Labour’s lead.
The chart below shows the average performance of 27 polls which predicted vote shares in the contest just prior to the election on July 4. The polling predictions are on the left and the actual vote shares are on the right for each of the five UK-wide political parties.
As a standard industry approximation, if the results differ from the outcomes by more than 3%, there is a statistically significant difference between the polling and the outcome. In other words, the pollsters got it wrong.
