British pollsters seek answers after getting election badly wrong

With votes counted in almost all of the 650 constituencies, the Conservatives were on course for an overall majority of over 326 seats in the House of Commons with Labour doomed to languish on the opposition benches with almost 100 fewer seats.
The result came as a complete shock to everyone after polls had been suggesting for months that the two big parties were neck-and-neck and neither of them would come close to winning an overall majority.
"There's only one opinion poll that counts and that's the one on election day and I'm not sure that's never been truer than it is today," Prime Minister David Cameron said after winning his own seat, Witney.
Some pollsters admitted something had gone badly wrong, and they did not yet understand what. "Election results raise serious issues for all pollsters. Wewill look at our methods and have urged the British PollingCouncil to set up a review," said Populus, one of the mainpolling firms, on Twitter.
Others, such as Survation and ComRes, defended their work, pointing out they had been right about the surge of the Scottish National Party, the collapse of the Liberal Democrats and asharp increase in vote share for anti-EU party UKIP.
Andrew Hawkins, chairman of ComRes, said this fragmentationof the political landscape had presented pollsters with "extraheadaches" by turning the election into a "patchwork of regionalcontests" where national trends were less relevant.
The polls had converged to suggest the Conservatives and Labour were tied or within a point or two of each other on about 32 or 33 percent of the vote share. In fact, the Conservatives won about 37 percent while Labour won about 31 percent.
RETURN OF THE SHY TORIES?
Rob Ford, one of Britain's most respected political scientists, drew comparisons with the polling disaster of 1992,when Labour were expected to win but the Conservatives beat their polling average by 9 points to romp home.
"Pollsters always mutter the words 1992 in a kind ofhorrified tone. They can now add 2015 to the recollections ofhorror," he told Reuters.
The problem in 1992 was identified as the so-called "shyTories" who were reluctant to own up that they would voteConservative at a time when the party was perceived to be unpopular. Tory is another name for Conservative.
But Ford said while there may have been some shy Tories this time, that was at best a partial explanation as pollsters had all been adjusting their data to reflect that known phenomenon.
Another possibility was that pollsters had not capturedrepresentative samples of the electorate, and onlyexperimentation with methods would address that in future.
"Polls, in the UK and in other places around the world,appear to be getting worse as it becomes more challenging tocontact a representative sample of voters," said U.S.forecasting guru Nate Silver on his FiveThirtyEight website.
It was also possible that voters who were undecided untilthe last minute had overwhelmingly voted Conservative, makingtheir minds up too late for the polls, said Ford.
Questions were also being raised about why different pollshad converged towards similar findings that were all wrong.
"These were different pollsters with different methodologiesbut everyone missed this. It's a very, very big miss and at thisstage we just don't know why. We're shocked," said Ford.
Damian Lyons Lowe, chief executive of Survation, said he had"chickened out" of publishing an eve of election poll that gaveresults much closer to what came to pass because it seemed suchan outlier, suggesting that some data had perhaps been ignored.
Further complicating the picture, under Britain'sfirst-past-the-post electoral system, what matters is comingfirst in individual seats rather than the national share of thevote.
That meant Labour lost over 20 seats despite increasing itsshare of the vote by about two percentage points since 2010,while the Conservatives gained over 20 seats despite increasingtheir vote share by less than one percentage point.
The main problem for Labour was that it was wiped out inScotland, losing 40 seats there to the Scottish National Party.
Labour also failed to take key swing seats from the Toriesin parts of England such as the East Midlands, and although itssupport increased in other regions such as Yorkshire, thatmerely increased its majorities in seats it already held there.
"Labour's problems have turned out to be even worse than thenational swings imply ... because it's gaining votes in areaswhere it doesn't help them while losing votes in places where ithurts," said Silver.