In a 140 charcacter tweet Glen O’Hara sums up the YouGov investigation into its GE2015 polling fail
Basically, too many pol engaged and/ or young people as a share of the sample. A bit like listening to Twitter. https://t.co/xoRZf2Klo9
— Glen O'Hara (@gsoh31) December 7, 2015
The big polling news tonight has been the publication of YouGov’s own inquiry into what went wrong. There’s a good summary by the firm’s Anthony Wells on his blog UK Polling report here.
A real problem that has been mentioned many times before is that those who take part in political opinion polls tend to be political more engaged than the norm. This makes them less representative inevitably distorts results.
On top of that YouGov starts its oldest age group at 60 which often means that its output is too influenced by the younger part of this segment and not enough by the older ones
Anthony’s post is well worth reading.