TenuredVulture wrote:I guess the other story is UKIP is getting wiped out, which benefits the Tories?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that pre-election polls underestimated how well Conservatives would do and overestimated Labour’s result. The BBC’s exit poll was one early sign. But we’re now seeing Conservatives outperform their poll-based projections as actual votes are reported from constituencies across the country. As of nearly 3 a.m. London time, our live forecast has the Tories expected to win 298 seats to Labour’s 249 — a fair bit wider than their 278-267 advantage in our pre-election forecast.
But if the polls have a poor election, it won’t be the first time. In fact, it’s become harder to find an election in which the polls did all that well.

Consider what are probably the four highest-profile elections of the past year, at least from the standpoint of the U.S. and U.K. media:

The final polls showed a close result in the Scottish independence referendum, with the “no” side projected to win by just 2 to 3 percentage points. In fact, “no” won by almost 11 percentage points.
Although polls correctly implied that Republicans were favored to win the Senate in the 2014 U.S. midterms, they nevertheless significantly underestimated the GOP’s performance. Republicans’ margins over Democrats were about 4 points better than the polls in the average Senate race.
Pre-election polls badly underestimated Likud’s performance in the Israeli legislative elections earlier this year, projecting the party to about 22 seats in the Knesset when it in fact won 30. (Exit polls on election night weren’t very good either.)
At least the polls got the 2012 U.S. presidential election right? Well, sort of. They correctly predicted President Obama to be re-elected. But Obama beat the final polling averages by about 3 points nationwide. Had the error run in the other direction, Mitt Romney would have won the popular vote and perhaps the Electoral College.

Perhaps it’s just been a run of bad luck. But there are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry. Voters are becoming harder to contact, especially on landline telephones. Online polls have become commonplace, but some eschew probability sampling, historically the bedrock of polling methodology. And in the U.S., some pollsters have been caught withholding results when they differ from other surveys, “herding” toward a false consensus about a race instead of behaving independently. There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry.

Taniel ‏@Taniel 2m
How wrong were polls? 11 were released over last 24 hours, and ALL were within the range of +1% Con to +2% Lab.

BBC now projects: +7% Con

jerseyhoya wrote: holy hell he'd be fun to beat by 400 electoral votes: