For bits and pieces.
First off: how one pollster almost got it right
http://survation.com/snatching-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory/'As in the Scottish Independence Referendum, where Survation shared “joint honours” with Ipsos Mori for accuracy, Survation conducted a voting intention telephone poll the day before the election (Wednesday) with three specific attributes:
Naming candidates through a ballot prompt specific to the respondents’ constituency based on their postcode.
Carefully balancing our sample based on age, region, sex, and past vote prior to weighting, from a nationally representative sample frame
And crucially, Speaking only to the named person from the dataset and calling mobile and landline telephone numbers to maximise the “reach” of the poll.
This was conducted over the afternoon and evening of Wednesday 6th May, as close as possible to the election to capture any late “swing” to any party – the same method we used in our telephone polls during the Independence Referendum that produced a 54% and a 53% figure for “no”.
This poll produced figures of:
CON 37%
LAB 31%
LD 10
UKIP 11
GRE 5
Others (including the SNP) 6%
We had flagged that we were conducting this poll to the Daily Mirror as something we might share as an interesting check on our online vs our telephone methodology, but the results seemed so “out of line” with all the polling conducted by ourselves and our peers – what poll commentators would term an “outlier” – that I “chickened out” of publishing the figures – something I’m sure I’ll always regret.'
