Yes, polls can be wrong. But the alternatives are worse | Martin Kettle

The answer to recent failures is not to abandon but to refine polling, as well as the way we interpret it

It isn’t exactly cool to speak up for the opinion polls these days. The pollsters’ failure to predict the Labour surge in 2017 has now joined the failure to predict the Tory majority in 2015 and the failure to predict the Brexit vote in 2016 to produce a hat-trick of polling incompetence. In some quarters polls are dismissed as not just unreliable but as a malevolent distraction, a form of ideological intervention to be spurned. So to admit, however quietly, to taking the polls seriously means at the very least having one’s tin hat at the ready.

Two years ago, the polling industry was forced to eat crow after David Cameron sailed back into Downing Street in an election in which the pollsters almost uniformly anticipated a hung parliament. An inquiry found that they were not sampling the voters accurately enough. This year, however, the pollsters have been less apologetic – although they are hardly in triumphalist mood. That’s because, as Prof John Curtice, the country’s most prominent poll analyst, told me yesterday: “In 2015 all the polls were wrong. In 2017 we had a spread. The failure wasn’t collective this time.”

Related: After this general election is it time to downgrade opinion polls? | Mona Chalabi

Related: Polling’s dirty little secret: why polls have been wrong before and will be again | David Lipsey

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