A small but very noisy section of the British news media seems to have come close to losing its collective sanity. The election campaign is maybe not quite what the people concerned would have wanted: the Tories are locked into an ever-deepening crisis, now crystallised by a gambling scandal, Labour is capably holding itself together, and the limited fireworks let off by Reform UK do not threaten the election’s seemingly inevitable result. So, for want of any other excitement, they have turned to another source of fun: opinion polls.
Has there ever been a campaign so dominated by them? For seven or eight years now, the most powerful polling companies have been developing so-called – and yes, I had to look this up – multilevel regression with poststratification (or MRP) surveys, which contact tens of thousands of voters, calculate results based on a range of granular demographic details, and result in findings that can be sifted constituency by constituency. The fact that YouGov used this method to unexpectedly predict 2017’s hung parliament has given it an air of quasi-scientific magic; now, the publication of one such poll after another is greeted in some quarters with a huge level of expectation.
