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Polling company YouGov has set alarm bells ringing with its projection that Nigel Farage will win Clacton with over 40% of the vote, prompting Alastair Campbell to call for Labour and the Conservatives to combine to block him – while others called on the Lib Dems and Greens to back Labour in the seat.
A panic had already been triggered by a Survation projection that Reform UK could win seven seats. And then Farage’s collaborator Matthew Goodwin popped up with a ‘poll’ that showed Reform nationally nine points ahead of the Conservatives.
It’s right to take the projections from independent polling companies seriously, if not Goodwin’s. Clearly Farage could win his seat, he should be blocked and tactical voting for a real alternative (not the Conservatives who are largely indistinguishable from Reform) is urgently needed. Yet we need to be clear that these are not conventional polls: they are projections, which although they use polling data, are based on complex “MRP” (multi-level regression and post-stratification) statistical models, and it is very difficult to evaluate them sensibly.
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As polling expert Matt Singh points out, there is an almost complete “lack of transparency”; none of the pollsters has “yet even listed their variables either for turnout or vote choice”, let alone explained fully how they combine the granular demographic data which is MRPs’ unique selling point with assumptions about political behaviour.
One of the more transparent pollsters, Ipsos Mori, specifically warns: “we would encourage readers to not place too much certainty into specific point estimates.” Yet this is what even widely publicised and reputable tactical voting sites are doing.
The Exmouth case
My own alarm bells were triggered by Survation’s call, since their ‘Reform’ seats included – of all places – the new constituency of Exmouth & Exeter East, which is mostly the old East Devon seat, next door to where I live. While Reform will undoubtedly garner some support, locals reported that it had hardly been seen in the constituency, and no one credited its projected first place.
Reform’s candidate Garry Sutherland appears even by its standards to be distinctly lacking in charm – he has a conviction for kicking a dog and has shared David Icke videos – and his behaviour at a recent hustings confirmed the impression this information gives.
Sceptics like British Future director, Sunder Katwala, were quick to suggest on X, formerly Twitter, that the source of Survation’s apparently rogue prediction for Exmouth was that its MRP model was finding it difficult to cope with the very unusual result in East Devon in 2019, when a left-leaning Independent, Claire Wright, was the main opposition to the Conservatives, winning 40% of the vote.
This difficulty had already caused one important tactical site, StoptheTories.vote, to pull a Labour recommendation for Exmouth based partly on MRP projections.
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This might not have mattered too much – none of the other projections agree that Reform is ahead in Exmouth and some like Electoral Calculus suggest that the Lib Dems, not Labour, are the challenger.
However, Best for Britain’s Get Voting, the most heavily promoted tactical voting site, is using Survation’s projection and using it to urge Labour voting in Exmouth – which may have the effect of helping the Conservatives cling on. This case therefore brings to the fore some major concerns about how MRPs, which are widely publicised both by their producers and the TV sites, could perversely skew tactical voting.
MRPs and tactical voting advice
The problem with using MRPs for tactical voting is not only that they are routinely described as ‘polling’ on Get Voting and other tactical sites, when they are not polls but statistical projections. It is also that their primary purpose is not to guide tactical voting, but to provide more accurate overall projections of the overall arithmetic in the next parliament.
MRPs have gained prominence because of the increasing fragmentation of the British political scene, with greater regional and local variation in how swings in public opinion affect constituency results and hence the parties’ national tallies.
The various MRPs use different models, and although their claims for greater precision than traditional polling might seem suspect – they currently offer a huge range of possible Labour majorities – they can claim modest successes in their first major outings, the 2017 and 2019 elections, and they are at least an attempt to deal with the reality that British elections are decided by 650 separate constituency contests.