The Performance of the Polls in the 2019 General Election
Election polling errors across time and space
Are election polling misses becoming more prevalent? Are they more likely in some contexts than others? Here we undertake an over-time and cross-national assessment of prediction errors in pre-election polls. Our analysis draws on more than 30,000 national polls from 351 general elections in 45 countries between 1942 and 2017. We proceed in the following way. First, building on previous studies, we show how errors in national polls evolve in a structured way over the election timeline. Second, we examine errors in polls in the final week of the election campaign to assess performance across election years. Third, we undertake a pooled analysis of polling errors—controlling for a number of institutional and party features—that enables us to test whether poll errors have increased or decreased over time. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the recent performance of polls has not been outside the ordinary. However, the performance of polls does vary across political contexts and in understandable ways.
The Twilight of the Polls? A Review of Trends in Polling Accuracy and the Causes of Polling Misses
Polls have had a number of high-profile misses in recent elections. We review the current polling environment, the performance of polls in a historical context, the mechanisms of polling error, and the causes of several recent misses in Britain and the US. Contrary to conventional wisdom, polling errors have been constant over time, although the level of error has always been substantially beyond that implied by stated margins of error. Generally, there is little evidence that voters lying about their vote intention (so-called ‘shy’ voters) is a substantial cause of polling error. Instead, polling errors have most commonly resulted from problems with representative samples and weighting, undecided voters breaking in one direction, and to a lesser extent late swings and turnout models. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for polling both in terms of fixing the problems identified and new approaches to understanding public opinion.
An Assessment of the Causes of the Errors in the 2015 UK Gseneral Election Opinion Polls
Summary The opinion polls that were undertaken before the 2015 UK general election underestimated the Conservative lead over Labour by an average of 7 percentage points. This collective failure led politicians and commentators to question the validity and utility of political polling and raised concerns regarding a broader public loss of confidence in survey research. We assess the likely causes of the 2015 polling errors. We begin by setting out a formal account of the statistical methodology and assumptions that are required for valid estimation of party vote shares by using quota sampling. We then describe the current approach of polling organizations for estimating sampling variability and suggest a new method based on bootstrap resampling. Next, we use poll microdata to assess the plausibility of different explanations of the polling errors. Our conclusion is that the primary cause of the polling errors in 2015 was unrepresentative sampling.
Opinion | This Is What Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling for Good
Instead of navigating the obstacles to conduct polls with human respondents, pollsters are running A.I. simulations instead. Why?
Why does every poll seem to show a tossup now?
Campaigns see internal polls as tools for fundraising
Victorian Election Polls 2026: The Third Corner
Updated 16 October 2026: the Coalition leads 53.9–46.1 across the eleven Victorian polls since the change of Premier, with One Nation on 22.7 per cent.
Victorian polls: RedBridge Group and Resolve Strategic - The Poll Bludger
Amid an unclear picture overall, two Victorian state polls show encouraging results for the Greens.
Victorian polls have Coalition leading Labor by narrow to large margins
About three months out from the Victorian state election, the five polls released since the state got a new premier all show the Coalition in front.
One Nation is soaring in polls. Winning power is much harder.
The nationalist party is riding high, but will struggle to convert its poll leads into parliament seats
Victorian election polls 2026 — average and ledger — Australian Election Tracker
Victorian state election 2026 polls: sourced statewide primary votes and a transparent weighted average with uncertainty bands. Latest tracker average (as of 2026-10-10): Labor 24.5%, Coalition 29.1%, One Nation 22.6%, Greens 14.9%, Others 8.9%. Not a forecast.
Code of Conduct — Australian Polling Council
A1. The Australian Polling Council is an organisation whose aims are to advance the quality and understanding of public opinion polling in Australia and in furtherance of these purposes:
FiftyPlusOne - Latest Political Polls and Averages
A comprehensive list of polls and polling averages for elections and politician approval.
FiftyPlusOne - Latest Political Polls and Averages
A comprehensive list of polls and polling averages for elections and politician approval.
Why Are American Presidential Election Campaign Polls so Variable When Votes Are so Predictable?
As most political scientists know, the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election can be predicted within a few percentage points (in the popular vote), based on information available months before the election. Thus, the general election campaign for president seems irrelevant to the outcome (except in very close elections), despite all the media coverage of campaign strategy. However, it is also well known that the pre-election opinion polls can vary wildly over the campaign, and this variation is generally attributed to events in the campaign. How can campaign events affect people's opinions on whom they plan to vote for, and yet not affect the outcome of the election? For that matter, why do voters consistently increase their support for a candidate during his nominating convention, even though the conventions are almost entirely predictable events whose effects can be rationally forecast? In this exploratory study, we consider several intuitively appealing, but ultimately wrong, resolutions to this puzzle, and discuss our current understanding of what causes opinion polls to fluctuate and yet reach a predictable outcome. Our evidence is based on graphical presentation and analysis of over 67,000 individual-level responses from forty-nine commercial polls during the 1988 campaign and many other aggregate poll results from the 1952–1992 campaigns. We show that responses to pollsters during the campaign are not generally informed or even, in a sense we describe, "rational." In contrast, voters decide which candidate to eventually support based on their enlightened preferences, as formed by the information they have learned during the campaign, as well as basic political cues such as ideology and party identification. We cannot prove this conclusion, but we do show that it is consistent with the aggregate forecasts and individual-level opinion poll responses. Based on the enlightened preferences hypothesis, we conclude that the news media have an important effect on the outcome of Presidential elections–-not due to misleading advertisements, sound bites, or spin doctors, but rather by conveying candidates' positions on important issues. Winner of the Pi Sigma Alpha Awardfor the best paper at the previous year's meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association. Replication data at the Harvard Dataverse: [https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/I7GIKD](https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/I7GIKD).
