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Political polling

philosophical said:
I am far from an expert on polling, but somebody linked to me this tweet thing:


It seems to suggest that pollsters might be underestimating the impact of voter registrations.
The person has a user name of Dr Moderate so I anticipate they might well get excoriated on this site.
Click to expand...
Great thread.

As noted earlier in the thread, unweighted polls have been showing Lab and Con neck-and-neck for weeks. If the weighting's off, it can skew the result massively, whether that's towards a Tory landslide (shudder) or hung parliament.
 
I confidently predict that the turnout by age in this election will be largely in line with the turnout by age in 2017, 2015 and 2010, and that any reason for polling error will not be as a result of reweighting for age.
 
kabbes said:
I confidently predict that the turnout by age in this election will be largely in line with the turnout by age in 2017, 2015 and 2010, and that any reason for polling error will not be as a result of reweighting for age.
Click to expand...
Why?

The collapse in young people voting in the UK was a peculiarly UK phenomenon. My guess is that the reason for it was largely Blair, Blairism and the Iraq War leading to a sense of disenfranchisement. If I'm right, that can and should change.
 
I do notice, anecdotal obviously, but young 'uns seem far more (too much) into party politics now than they were when I was a teenager/early 20s
 
Azrael said:
Great thread.

As noted earlier in the thread, unweighted polls have been showing Lab and Con neck-and-neck for weeks. If the weighting's off, it can skew the result massively, whether that's towards a Tory landslide (shudder) or hung parliament.
Click to expand...

Now i know why I avoided stats at college.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Why?

The collapse in young people voting in the UK was a peculiarly UK phenomenon. My guess is that the reason for it was largely Blair, Blairism and the Iraq War leading to a sense of disenfranchisement. If I'm right, that can and should change.
Click to expand...

in France many of the young are marching against pension reform, can't imagine that here.
 
Richard Seymour's latest mailout covers a lot of the ground discussed over the last page on this thread, and is worth a read - I've pasted it below for you.

Labour, they say, is now a party of young people, not workers. This sort of commentary is painfully silly. But we shouldn't dismiss it entirely out of hand. The generational cleavage in voting patterns just is enormous, and quite novel. There has long been a tendency for younger voters to moderately prefer Labour. But while Labour enjoyed a 15 point lead among 18-24 year olds in 2010, by 2017 it was 54 per cent. That's a huge shift.

More generally, the character of the campaign betrays a generational rift. I've been canvassing with people of all ages, but the mere fact that so many young people are among them is itself extraordinary. When I was a student, hardly any self-respecting leftist would be a proud Labour activist. Still less would they put their lives on hold to get Labour elected. Now they wear Labour sweaters, Labour scarves, Labour rosettes, Labour hates, Labour stickers - with pride, passion and heart. Young people with tech skills are lining up to make video content for Labour, to help it win the digital battle, to register new voters, overwhelmingly on a volunteer basis. Youth culture, from grime to memes, has overwhelmingly cleaved to Labour.

Much as we should avoid generational cliches, in this moment, it has an element of truth. The problem with most of the commentary about generations is that treats age as an explanatory variable in itself. Age explains nothing. In other parts of Europe, young people are more likely to cleave to the far right. If you want to talk about age, you have to index it to lived experiences. As Keir Milburn points out, in Generation Left, age is now one of the modalities of class experience. "By 2016," he writes, "the average Millennial working through their twenties had already earned £8,000 less than the average of the preceding generation." At the same time, young people spend an average of £44,000 more on rent through their twenties than baby boomers did. In the decade from 2007 to 2016, all new wealth went to over-45s (though unevenly), while incomes fell by around 10 per cent among those aged 16-34.

In itself, Milburn suggests, even this doesn't explain very much. Declining wages, eroding welfare rights, growing insecurity, can have the opposite effect of radicalising people. It can, as the acid Corbynites put it, be a form of consciousness deflation. It can so reduce expectations that people retreat to the lowest possible horizons of individual survival, and reject politics as a source of oppression. Indeed, the traditionally lower average electoral turnouts among younger voters suggests this holds. Moreover, the mere fact that the populous layer of baby boomers are more likely to own a house, a car and maybe even some savings, is itself something to be explained.
 
pt. 2

It's easy to say, the boomers got their jobs and houses just on time, and then selfishly abandoned the younger generation. But it's wrong. And it misses the point. As Milburn correctly points out, the boomers are a defeated generation. They had welfare, unions and a reasonable living standard, albeit with many people excluded from the class compromise. Millions of them had dreams of achieving much more than this. Under the Thatcherite onslaught, they lost so much of what they had that they had little choice and little incentive but to adopt characteristically neoliberal means of reproducing themselves. Buy a council house, rely on rising prices to borrow more, rely on self-improvement, training and education, to get a ahead. Use debt to supplement wages. That strategy showed diminishing returns well before 2008, but after that it broke down dramatically. But, the system not being able to reform itself, and no alternative having yet been imposed, most young people have been forced to keep relying on the olds methods of reproducing themselves, at great personal and political cost.

This is what Milburn calls, using the categories of operaismo, the 'technical composition of class'. The 'political composition of class' is a result of moments of politicisation, galvanising events. The period from late 2010 to late 2011, from the student rebellion to Occupy and the 'Arab Spring', is one such moment. A period of incipient consciousness-raising, experimentation with popular assemblies, and ultimately resounding defeat. An experience which gave rise to a series of experiments with electoral politics. This has been a harsh learning curve, with its own pedagogical defeats: Syriza, most painfully. But the effect over the long-term has been that the political indeterminacy of Occupy, has given rise to much clearer and more definitely leftist programmes for reform. It has also given rise, unevenly, to broadly leftist answers to the problem of how to translate political radicalism into the pragmatics of electoral struggle. Moreover, these programmes, whether supported by Sanders or Corbyn, have been strongly influenced by grassroots activists and movements. Sanders moved to the left on immigration, because he listened to campaigners. Labour moved left on climate, because Labour activists got organised.

The breakthrough of 2017, and the successes of the Sanders campaign in 2016, suggested that this new Left had already hegemonised the working-class youth. They could have gone anywhere, but they went Left. And they seem to have re-engaged young workers politically, well beyond the activist core. Although the British Election Study contested the idea of a 'youthquake', a major survey with a sample of 40,000 people suggests that the idea was actually correct: that there was a dramatic surge in youth turnout in 2017. Whatever view we take on that controversy, it is clear that voters under forty preferred Labour much more strongly than in previous elections. Despite the nonsense about these voters being metropolitan elites - come to Haringey, come to Tottenham, and see those metropolitan elites begging for change - they are largely people who rely on wages, not rents. If they can get wages. They don't own their homes, they are less likely to have cars, and their living standards are lower.

What is at stake in this election, is partly whether or not these voters will defy polling expectations, defy the long slow grind of consciousness deflation, defy the Tory strategy of demoralisation through relentless confusion and lies, and vote Labour. The issue here isn't apathy or laziness. It is not the minimal effort it takes to get to the polling booth and put a cross on a bit of paper. The issue is whether we have persuaded people to take the emotional risk: to get their hopes up, even if they might be dashed. To try, knowing that hopes are nowhere near enough, but hopelessness is self-fulfilling.

Ell Smith, the leftist statistician, argues, there is some evidence of the 'youthquake' making another appearance below the surface of the polls. Obviously, this depends on how seriously you take those polls. But there are trends here. As the election goes on, young people indicate a far stronger likelihood to vote. Moreover, as we saw, registrations of new voters reached a record level, at 3.85 million. Probably about a third of those are, as in the past, duplicates, which still leaves us with 2.4 million new voters. Of those, over two thirds are under 35. That suggests a high degree of interest in the election and, if the 'generation left' thesis holds, and I think it does, it suggests that there will be a comparatively high turnout among younger voters.

However, a huge caveat is necessary here. The polls say Labour has lost ground, since 2017, among all demographics over the age of 35. In 2017, YouGov's polling suggested Labour had a lead among all voters under the age of 50. And even among older voters, it picked up significant numbers of votes: a fifth of all voters over 75 is not nothing. Losing ground with those voters is costly, because the Boomers are far more populous than the Millennials. We rightly say, trust no polls, because they are simply not fit for purpose in such a volatile political environment. But it's uncontroversial that Labour is having to fight for many of those voters, particularly in the North and West Midlands. And a big issue for many of them is Brexit. Labour has succeeded in making this election less of a Brexit contest than it would have been, but it's still important to key groups of voters. There is also the issue of how motivated Tory pensioners are to vote in this election. Again, take it with a pinch of salt, but polling suggests they're even more likely to turnout than in 2017. Perhaps some voters who were complacent about Labour back then, will be more determined to keep us out now.

We need the 'youthquake' to materialise. We need those numbers. And we need it to be bigger than in 2017. But clearly, it's not enough. It might be enough for a social movement, but it is not enough for an electoral coalition. We need cross-generational coalitions based on the shared experience of class. That's what we achieved in 2017, and what we're fighting for now.
 
[QUOTEIn itself, Milburn suggests, even this doesn't explain very much. Declining wages, eroding welfare rights, growing insecurity, can have the opposite effect of radicalising people. It can, as the acid Corbynites put it, be a form of consciousness deflation. It can so reduce expectations that people retreat to the lowest possible horizons of individual survival, and reject politics as a source of oppression. Indeed, the traditionally lower average electoral turnouts among younger voters suggests this holds. Moreover, the mere fact that the populous layer of baby boomers are more likely to own a house, a car and maybe even some savings, is itself something to be explained. ][/QUOTE]

isn't this what has happened in the U.S for a long time?
 
i know it's naive to think perhaps the polling is biased because their net tends to catch older voters and so on but survation's past record would suggest there is very serious possibility of significant tory majority.
 
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