What difference did the polls make to the election?

Paddy Ashdown, who ran the Lib Dem campaign, believes his party was on course to hold on to 25-30 MPs until the opinion polls fed a frenzy of Labour/SNP coalition headlines. He believes that if the polls had been more accurate voters would have sensed the choice was “Conservatives with the Lib Dems” or “Conservatives on their own” and we would now be living under the second coalition government.

Stewart Wood, senior adviser to Ed Miliband when he was Leader of the Labour Party, believes the polls must have been wrong for all the years of Ed Miliband’s leadership and that raises questions about whether Labour would have toppled Mr Miliband if he hadn’t been propped up by an illusory poll lead.

In his comments on the interim findings by the British Polling Council and the Market Research Society, Professor Patrick Sturgis focuses on the polling samples, the fact that polling companies failed to get to enough over 70s in their “over 60s” cohort, given the senior voters’ turnout at the polls. He also focuses on the tendency of “politically engaged” voters (themselves tending to be left-leaning) to take part in polls in contrast to Tory-leaning voters who tend to avoid taking part.

There were a few weirdly accurate polls but they never developed into a trend. In his very brief press release, Professor Sturgis says that he is “unable to rule out the possibility that ‘herding’ .. played a part in forming the statistical consensus,” pollsters tweaking their data to make sure they’re not too far out from the pack of other polls. Professor Sturgis is at pains to say nothing improper happened but some will think that if people were regularly adjusting numbers to stay with the pack that might be, at the very least, a bit rum.

I put it to Peter Kellner of YouGov that inaccurate polls had skewed the election outcome. He pleaded “half guilty” but said the media and the politicians should be in the dock with him. Politicians and journalists, he said, should try not to get so hung up about polls in the future.

That may take care of itself if polls turn out to be fewer in number because the expense of tracking down elderly Greta Garbo’ish Tories becomes prohibitive. But I doubt that will happen.

I suspect those clever pollsters will magic their way back to a period of amazing accuracy until humanity throws up the next glitch and sends them back to the workshop.