12. The Polls

The polls played a central role in charting the ebb and flow in public opinion over the course of the Parliament, shaping the political narrative and the parties’ strategies. The polling industry itself is always in flux, as pollsters come and go, and polling firms adjust their practices to maintain and improve their measurement of public opinion in an ever-changing environment. This was arguably the first election where ‘MRP’ models, which give estimates of the state of the race in every constituency, played a major role in framing pollsters’ estimates and public understanding of the contest. This rapidly spreading new technique highlighted the importance of local variations in party performance ahead of the election, meaning Labour and the Liberal Democrats’ positions were widely understood to be better, and the Conservatives’ position worse, than aggregate polling alone would suggest. The polls also help us chart the changing political agenda across a turbulent four years, with different issues rising and falling as first Brexit, then Covid-19, then Ukraine, then inflation, then towards the end immigration and public services became the centre of attention for the public. While the detailed picture is complex and dynamic, the broad-brush polling story in this Parliament is more straightforward: Labour had the more popular (or at least less unpopular) leader and gradually gained an advantage over the Conservatives across most issues – including the economy and even immigration – aided by the steep declines in voters’ assessments of three successive Conservative governments and their Prime Ministers. Election day is a crucial day of judgement for the pollsters and in this election they were fortunate, in that the expected Labour landslide duly came to pass and so distracted from what in fact was a large polling miss. Several features seem to have contributed to that miss, but there is no guarantee the same issues will not arise next time, and indeed new challenges may emerge even if pollsters manage to address those identified this time.