Brexit and unmerited complacency

Friday morning was a strange one for me. As I tried to come to terms with the fact that the country has made what I believe to be a catastrophically short sighted decision, at the same time I was receiving emails and Tweets congratulating me on the fact that Opinium were one of only two polling companies (congratulations TNS) to predict a 'Leave' vote.

Remember the final polls. Opinium could be top pic.twitter.com/fJyfReJMZT

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) June 24, 2016

I've seen plenty of articles, Tweets and headlines about how much of a shock the result was, especially after the pound rallied so dramatically in the final week on the expectation of a Remain vote and an end to the uncertainty caused by the referendum.

Latest betting and chart. pic.twitter.com/QWWiQt7rok

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) June 24, 2016

Betting markets were clear that Remain was almost a dead cert. Every expert predicted a Remain win. The "poll of pollsters" had all of us predicting a Remain win (although I feel I covered myself just enough here). The Times Red Box podcast, of which I am a loyal listener, asked every guest to predict the Remain share of the vote and I don't think I heard more than a handful give an answer that was lower than 50%.
In polls, as well as asking how people would vote, we asked what they thought the result would be. In the same poll that showed a Leave win, 46% thought Remain would win vs. just 27% predicting a Leave win.

Even Boris Johnson, in his victory speech, had the look of a man whose actions were predicated on the belief that he wouldn't have to follow through.

Now, after the vote there are articles about voters who backed Leave as a protest because they were so confident that Remain would win and didn't think their vote would actually have an impact.

All I can think is "why?" Why were people so certain that Remain would win?


Was it because the idea of actually leaving was, like Scottish independence in 2014, so unthinkable, such a wrenching change to the status quo that surely it couldn't happen? The idea that surely the public were too sensible to actually go through with it?

Because it's not as if the polls were unanimous in saying that Britain would vote to stay in. The biggest lead Opinium had for Remain was 4 points (albeit prior to a method change that had the effect of boosting Remain). Other online polls repeatedly showed a tight race and had done all year.

Telephone polls confidently predicted a Remain vote but the idea that telephone polls are more accurate than online ones was disproved at the 2015 general election when telephone polls were just as right or wrong as online ones. Nevertheless, we still got articles like this by Danny Finkelstein and tweets like the one below perpetuating the idea that the only serious, 'proper' polls were done on the phone:

Industry experts consider phone polls more accurate than online. Online poll responders tend to be time rich, cash poor and favour Brexit.

— Isabel Oakeshott (@IsabelOakeshott) June 18, 2016

When the polls tell you different things it's easy to pick the ones that you want to believe and then find reasons to justify that belief. You can pick the one that 'feels' the most accurate and go with it.

The feeling I had during the campaign was that online polls would come out more frequently, telling everybody that the race was nail-bitingly close and then every 10 days a telephone poll would be released causing everybody to relax and assume things would be fine. The average of both modes would give you a small Remain lead which, along with the mythical 'on the day status quo swing-back' led many to believe that a Remain win was inevitable. Even when all polls showed a big swing towards Leave in the penultimate week, this belief that things would swing-back prevailed and, in any case, there was that ComRes poll showing Remain still ahead by a point.

Except that there was no 'status quo swing-back' and one method of polling got the result completely wrong, skewing the average.

The status quo swing-back in Scotland rested on two things:

1) That older voters who always turn out in greater numbers than younger ones were heavily in favour of the status quo (i.e. remaining part of the UK).
2) That the majority of Scottish voters, regardless of their voting intention, believed that they would be financially worse off in the event of independence.

In the EU referendum neither of these were the case and polls showed this quite clearly. The age gap in 2016 was the direct opposite of that in the Scottish referendum with support for Leave increasing with age. The comparison between the two referendums when it comes to being financially better or worse off is well made here. While the belief that people would be financially worse off if we left the EU did rise in the final week, it still only made it to 33% vs. the 42% and above seen in Scotland.

As well as this, only two published polls in Scotland ever showed support for independence actually in front compared to dozens of Leave leads in the EU referendum polling.

Again, this was known before the vote and yet all the predictions (including mine) were for Remain, an astonishing degree of complacency. I wonder if it's in any way to do with the fact that all polling agencies and the vast majority of news organisations are based in 60:40 Remain-voting London?

After the 2015 general election, there was a case to be made that the polls incorrectly predicting a hung parliament caused the debate to focus on coalition maneuverings rather than what was actually in the Conservative manifesto that would now be implemented if they had a majority. I would argue that the Conservatives only had an actual majority because they over performed in the marginals and UNS would have given us a hung parliament. Nevertheless, it's an argument about how polls affect political discourse that I believe has more merit in the case of the EU referendum.

I know people in many different polling companies and all of them work tirelessly to try and ensure that their results give the most accurate representation of public opinion possible.

Nevertheless, one method of polling had a systemic failure which, along with a spectacular demonstration of the inability of betting markets to forecast elections, helped influence the perception that Remain was a much more likely outcome than it actually was. How many voters chose Leave because they believed that a vote for Leave could be a cost-free protest?

The EU referendum campaign was grim, nasty and outrageously misleading. The idea that we could have voted ourselves out of the EU in part by accident is a fitting epitaph.