Swimming with the tide....

[BoldonLad]

It depends what you mean by accurate!
Thing is, any given survey is only a snapshot. Some major event could happen the day after the survey was taken (like the Queen dying) and the results could change overnight.
Polls, like other research, are a starting point, a marker an indicator. More often that not other surveys are carried-out that might start to show similar trends. Get enough surveys and you can start to do meta-analyses which improves confidence in the data and sometimes discover new connections.

I don't profess to be a stats master, but know several who are, and it's a bloody complex business!

However, the Govt. has just been pulled-up over Moggs Imperial measures yougov. poll, which even a rank amateur like me can spot is heavily biased, so scepticism is well placed....

Well, this is my point really. Usually, only the "headline" is reported to the masses, and, it is therefore very easy to get a skewed perception of what is happening. If Polls can be skewed to JRM's. "advantage", presumably, they can just as easily be skewed to other's advantage. Given that we no longer have Media which does analysis, but, just looks for sound bites and clicks, the nuances of methodology are unlikely to be reported, and, even less likely to be understood.

 

[Salty seadog]

ONS, NHS, we are the envy of the world at some things.

@BoldonLad

I was being serious.

 

[newfhouse]

In other news ballot boxes on the referendum for areas of the Ukraine to rejoin Russia are going house to house accompanied by Russian guns to skew that vote too.

They’re doing similar here for the metric survey. Give the wrong answer and you risk a whack across the buttocks with a metre rule yardstick.

 

[winjim]

OK OK, personally, I am not against PR, but, I don't understand how you can give "predictions" of what the last election would have produced, if PR had been in place, without, also specifying the form of PR you are "assuming" was in place.

Forget forms of PR for now, it's a distraction. For starters people would have voted differently if PR was in place. Whatever. The point is that we were asked if all the supposed social liberals or what have you from the survey would be voting along those lines in the next election, but they already did in the last one. A majority of the electorate who voted in the last election cast their ballot for socially progressive parties.

Which brings us on to PR...

 

[BoldonLad]

@BoldonLad

I was being serious.

Oh dear, so was I

 

[Salty seadog]

Oh dear, so was I

Ok, they are both very well respected institutions internationally.

 

[jowwy]

This is partly true, as far as the UK government is concerned where, at the 2019 GE, Labour lost six seats as part of the Red Wall swing.

However Labour increased its share of the vote and seats in the Senedd in 2021, whereas the Tories increased their support in the Senedd, but at the expense of Plaid and LD.

And increased its council share recently too in the local elections…since the 2019 ge conservatives having been losing seats in wales hand over fist.

 

[Mugshot]

They have lost support in Scotland and Wales and aren't going to get it back again quickly.

View: https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1573995853638950912?t=Cd7ZrYJR25aB_wUhD0svUg&s=19

 

[icowden]

View: https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1573995853638950912?t=Cd7ZrYJR25aB_wUhD0svUg&s=19

Ok - they have improved in Wales from a low of about 37% - but they used to regularly poll at over 50%

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsand...t-uk-history-that-almost-no-one-has-heard-of/

And in Scotland they have been pretty much eradicated along with the tories by the SNP.