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Posted to uk.d-i-y
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Ot These useless polls.
(Andrew Gabriel) wrote:
In article ,
Lobster writes:
On 12 May 2015, Nightjar "cpb"@ insert my surname here.me.uk grunted:
What it means is that people told the pollsters the same thing, but that
thing wasn't what all of them did in the end.
It's the 'shy Tory' effect, I'm sure. People are embarrassed to admit they
vote Conservative. Think how common it is to hear people banging on in the
pub or round the office water cooler about how they hate the Tories etc
etc, how Labour will sort it all out etc etc. You just never hear it the
other way round, do you?
That may well be part of it, but it seems that a significant number of
people didn't make up their minds until entering the polling station.
Conservatives won out here - these people are not necessarily embarrassed
to say they voted Conservative, but genuinely didn't know they were
going to until polling day. I think many of them were not naturally
There was something on the BBC site about how Labour's own pollsters got
a more accurate (pessimistic, they called it) result. Apparently, the
difference was that they asked respondents to think about the issues at
stake before asking whom they would vote for.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32606713
Conservative voters and might have been waiting for something from one
of the other parties to make them vote differently, but none of the other
parties pulled anything viable out of the hat.
I got a sense of the possible result a few weeks before when I popped
in to Travis Perkins early one morning. There were a few van loads of
builders standing around the counter discussing their votes, and they were
mostly going to be voting Conservative, fearing labour would screw up
their industry, which they regard as recovering very well at the moment.
If Labour had lost the trust of these folks, it didn't bode well for
Labour's result.
The fear of a Labour-SNP alliance when the polls were showing Labour was
going to crash in Scotland was also a significant effect in people not
voting Labour. It was no use Labour saying it wouldn't do that - they
would virtually have been forced to do so if the Conservatives could
only muster a minority governmant without enough support from elsewhere.
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