Ban the polls: UK election strategists slam ‘inaccurate’ voter surveys

LONDON — Opinion polls are inaccurate, distort political debate and should be banned during the final weeks of an election campaign. That’s the view of the strategist who led the British Conservative Party’s operations in 2024 and 2019.  

In an interview for a new book on this year’s U.K. general election, Tory campaign director Isaac Levido slammed the “unhealthy” dominance of polling in the media coverage of the campaign, which his side lost to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in July.

Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who directed Labour’s successful election bid, also sees the argument for a moratorium on publishing polls in the run-up to voting, according to Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election. 

Some industry professionals agree that political polling is broken, and needs to be given a reality check. In this month’s U.S. presidential election, for example, pollsters underestimated the pro-Donald Trump vote — as they did in both 2016 and 2020. 

The forthcoming book describes widespread unease and deep anger within former Tory Leader Rishi Sunak’s inner circle at the way polling dominated the national debate before the U.K. election. 

Getting it wrong

For one thing, the polls got the headline vote-share result significantly wrong, an error masked by the fact that the overall result — a Labour victory — was clear. Instead of a 20-point lead for Labour over the Tories, as the polls had consistently suggested, the election delivered a winning margin of half that size, with Labour securing 34 percent of the vote to the Tories’ 24 percent. 

Levido, the Australian strategist who ran the Conservatives’ campaign this year and Boris Johnson’s successful run in 2019, said it was time for reform. 

“I’m not arguing that we would not have lost,” Levido said in an interview published in the book. “But the inaccuracy of the polls and the reporting of them by the media increasingly play an outsized role in election campaigns. The polls are frankly given far too much attention relative to a proper policy debate, and it significantly influences how voters behave. 

“I’m not sure it’s realistic to ban polls for the whole campaign period, but I certainly think some sort of blackout in the final couple of weeks, as some other countries have, would be healthy. Other countries have blackouts on TV advertising in the final two or three days of the campaign, too.”

Some senior Tories said they believed their own party colleagues would have behaved better if the polls had not given Labour a lead which turned out to be twice as big as the reality, which then dominated coverage in newspapers and on broadcasts, according to the book. 

Lagging more than 20 points behind in most polls demoralized Tory troops and made it harder for the party bosses to enforce discipline among elected politicians who were fighting for their own skins, party officials told the authors. 

Time for a ban?

Even the winners see the problem, according to the book. McSweeney, who is now Starmer’s chief of staff, ran the Labour election campaign which delivered a devastatingly efficient result. According to one Labour official, also granted anonymity, privately McSweeney agrees that polling dominated the campaign and distorted the debate. 

Instead of focusing on the competing policy offers from rival parties or assessing which candidate would make the better prime minister, media reporting obsessed with the size of Labour’s likely majority. The Labour government is not likely to change the law on polling, however, the official said.

European countries including Cyprus and Spain have rules banning the publication of polls in the final days before voting, while in Italy, publishing poll results is banned for two weeks before election day.

Martin Boon, from the British polling company Deltapoll, warned well before the U.S. results came in that the polls were at risk of underplaying support for the Republicans.

As for the British election, he said the polling industry’s predictions were the worst for a generation. “This is either the very worst or the second worst polling performance since 1979,” Boon said in an interview for the book. “There is something fundamentally wrong with the data we collect.”  

For Levido, one answer would be to beef up the regulator by giving the British Polling Council genuine teeth and the power to impose sanctions on polling companies that fail or break the rules. “If some of these polling organizations are sanctioned by a governing body, that would help,” he said.

“Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election,” by Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth, is published by Biteback Thursday.