LONDON (Bywire News) - Did YouGov manipulate its own polling and election coverage in 2017, because it was too favourable for Labour? That’s the shocking allegation in a Twitter thread from one of their own former employees.
The thread comes from Chris Curtis – currently a senior pollster at Opinium – who decided to share his perspective of the 2017 General Election. His Tweets, which quickly went viral, detail a number of important allegations.
1. YouGov Struggled to believe their own data
As the election drew on, the gap between Labour and the Tories narrowed dramatically culminating in a shock poll at the time of the Manchester bombing in which they appeared to have drawn level. That poll was spiked, but data using an innovative MRP model – thought to be more accurate than traditional polling – backed this up, predicting a hung parliament. At the time, the poll faced ridicule from a media that had convinced itself that a Tory landslide was inevitable.
2. Political interference
Among those struggling to digest the MRP poll was Nadhim Zahawi – currently Education Secretary and possible successor to Boris Johnson. At the time he was a senior Tory MP, but he was also a co-founder of YouGov. He called the CEO warning him that he would call for his resignation if the poll turned out to be wrong. From here on YouGov’s coverage took a very different turn.
3. Ignoring data
What YouGov could have done was state that the MRP simply reflected what the traditional polls were telling them – that the gap between Labour and the Conservatives was narrowing dramatically. Instead, they described the MRP poll as a new and experimental methodology framing it as an outlier leaving everyone free to disregard it which they duly did.
4. Blocking election coverage
The truth was that Labour’s campaign was gaining momentum. A combination of a highly popular manifesto, Corbyn’s powerful campaigning and the government’s own woeful performance was swinging public opinion dramatically in the Labour leader’s favour. Polling after a major TV debate showed that Corbyn had won comfortably with even one in four Tory supporters believing he had performed the best. However, Curtis claimed, that the article and poll were suppressed because the news was deemed too positive for Labour.
5. Manipulating polling data
Curtis goes on to allege that YouGov then changed their methodology to ensure the remaining polls would widen the Conservative lead over Labour giving the impression that Theresa May, despite a rocky campaign, was still on the way to a comfortable majority.
As we all know, YouGov should have been more trusting of its data. The MRP turned out to be bang on the money. Theresa May lost her majority only clinging onto power thanks to an unholy alliance with the DUP.
The lesson, Curtis suggests, is that he, and YouGov, should have ignored the external noise and trusted the data.
“A few lessons I have learned from the campaign,” he wrote on Twitter.
“1. Trust the data, 2. Ignore political commentators when they don't trust the data, 3. The electorate is volatile now, bigger shifts are to be expected.”
However, this thread is about much more than pollsters not believing their own research – it’s about the role they play in political life and, more importantly, whether they can be trusted to act impartially.
A question of integrity
Love them or loathe them, polling companies are crucial to political discourse. They claim to act as bell weathers of political sentiment. They tell us what issues people care about and what parties they are likely to support. During elections, they keep score giving us a rough indication of who is ahead, who is behind and who is generating momentum.
Intentionally or not, they shape the narrative of every election, and they were arguably more important than ever in 2017. It was the polls showing Labour trailing by more than 20 points which encouraged May to call what she thought was an opportunistic general election. With Labour divided now seemed a perfect opportunity to expand her wafer-thin majority and give herself a clear mandate to push Brexit through.
It would be the polling which shaped the narrative, and had YouGov been more open with people, that narrative would have been very different. The buried debate poll proved that Corbyn was winning over voters, even Tories. It proved that the MRP was showing the direction of travel. Had that narrative been told, then the sense of momentum around the Labour campaign might have been unstoppable. There will be many who feel YouGov’s actions helped sway the result back towards the Conservative.
Whether that’s true or not we can never know and until someone brings VAR into elections it’s somewhat redundant. An alternative view could be that it might have even helped Labour. Had Conservatives been more worried about the result, they might have campaigned differently. More of their voters may have headed to the polls.
However, it calls into question the one thing polling companies rely on more than anything else – their reputation for impartiality. YouGov, in particular, has faced constant scrutiny due to one of its founders being a prominent Conservative minister. The idea that they may have shaped their polling based on external pressure is toxic to their credibility.
YouGov, for their part, has denied Curtis’ claims. In a statement they said:
“The idea that YouGov would suppress a poll which was ‘too positive for Labour’ is clearly wrong’. For evidence, they point to the MRP model which was more favourable to Labour than most others. They also claim that the debate poll was suppressed because it was clear that the sample of people who watched the debate significantly overrepresented Labour voters.”
Responding to that response, though, Curtis pointed out that the significant data from that debate was that so many Conservative voters had been swayed by Corbyn.
“BES open end data in the following days shows the debate was one of the big reasons why people shifted their voting preference. This is a big story that I feel went untold, and which is why I mentioned it in my thread.”
Curtis is at pains to point out that he doesn’t feel Zahawi deliberately set out to influence YouGov. Zahawi himself has taken to Twitter to suggest the comment was a joke made between friends. Rather, Curtis posted the thread to illustrate the sense of panic which ran through YouGov at the sight of their own polling.
What this thread does show, though, is the importance of trusting the evidence before you – even when you don’t like the result. It was why political commentators have been surprised by just about everything which happened over the last ten years. From the rise of Corbyn to Trump and Brexit, they have allowed political bias to distract them from the story which was unfolding in front of their eyes. It’s why they tend to be wrong about everything all the time.
(Writing by Tom Cropper, editing by Klaudia Fior)