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Smart timing from May - this will be devastating for Corbyn. Current polling: CON 43, LAB 25 [1] Conservatives won the 2015 Election polling at 34% [2]. [1]

• hacker_9 9y ago
  Too bad polls haven't been accurate for a while now.
  • samdoidge 9y ago
    As someone who made money betting on a Trump victory - certain topics / polls. Calling Brexit / Trump voters racist leads to a certain % of the population not disclosing their vote, oversampling of Democrats was another issue in the US polls.
    • ZeroGravitas 9y ago
      That not what oversampling means. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/25/oversampling-is-used-to-study-small-groups-not-bias-poll-results/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/25/oversampling...
      • samdoidge 9y ago
        I'm aware of what oversampling means. I was listing the 'hidden vote' and oversampling as a reason.
        • ZeroGravitas 9y ago
          That still makes no sense.
          • samdoidge 9y ago
            Can you elaborate on what doesn't make sense?
            • ZeroGravitas 9y ago
              Oversampling is a standard thing to do with polling. There's a confused conspiracy theory that it means "adding extra votes to the Democrat column". This doesn't even stand up to the most cursory of examinations, as if that was really happening then people would say "they're intentionally fudging the results to favor the Democrats" and kick up a fuss about it. Instead they say "oversampling Democrats", in the hope that people who don't know what that is will think it sounds like cheating while not actually looking like idiots to people who do know what it means. A classic dogwhistle approach to say two things to two audiences. You claim to know what it is, yet you say it's an "issue" (which it isn't) and you say that at the end of a sentence claiming that there's a "shy voter" factor leading to an undercount of Trump support. Oversampling has no logical connection here unless you mean it in the "Democrats are cheating in the polls" meaning. You claim that you mean it in the actual statistical meaning. The two obvious explanations are that you don't know what it is and have been fooled by all the chatter around it, or that you're trying to fool others despite knowing it's nonsense. I think you don't know what it is, that's why I provided the explanatory link a couple of comment above. Also, the polls did not materially undercount Trump voters. The polls were more accurate than at the last election. Some people badly mapped the accurately predicted 3 million popular vote win to electoral college results, but that's a different thing than polls being bad, Trump voters not wanting to admit who they were voting for, or being intentionally skewed. On a state by state basis polls were wrong in both directions, for various reasons, but that cancelled out overall.
              • samdoidge 9y ago
                Ok, so when you were telling me 'that's not what oversampling means', you meant 'I disagree with what you are saying'. I would be more inclined to debate if you approached the disagreement in a more open fashion. Your partisan paragraphs further make me think I will be wasting my time here, so let's just say we have different views on the polls :).
    • JCzynski 9y ago
      Polls were accurate in both those cases. Media coverage of them was wrong, but the polls were right.
  • anoonmoose 9y ago
    Brexit was too close to call and Hillary won the popular vote so it ain't like things in the polling world are all that wild.
  • pmyteh 9y ago
    Polling is hard; there are lots of ways for polls to be inaccurate (see the British Polling Council postmortem of the last general election for the gory details). Those errors don't add up to 20 points. And I say that as a card-carrying member of the Labour party.
  • easytiger 9y ago
    That's not true. Last Uk election was very close and that was reflected in the polls. Same with brexit.