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Comment by mrec | Hacker News Reader

> The BBC seemed like it picked a winner, and the US media does the same while dismissing all others. If I remember right the last UK election was pretty surprising to the BBC and its pollsters.

I don't know anything about Minnesota, but wrt this referendum and the last UK General Election it wasn't so much "picking a winner" as that relentless vilification of the non-establishment side led to people concealing their actual voting intentions from pollsters. In the case of the GE this even applied to exit polling, i.e. after people had voted. There wasn't any official exit polling for the referendum, but some major banks did it privately and I think Leave's premature concession early in the results points to the same thing happening there.

Thank you for a very thoughtful and measured post, by the way; we could do with more of that. The atmosphere here in the UK at the moment is just poisonous, with some fairly mortifying behaviour on both sides.

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> relentless vilification of the non-establishment side led to people concealing their actual voting intentions from pollsters

I get the same thought and would love to know how someone would do a study on the subject. I know it was true in MN at the time (who wants to admit they're voting for a wrestler because they are sick of the other two)[1].

> The atmosphere here in the UK at the moment is just poisonous, with some fairly mortifying behavior on both sides.

Yep, the edges always show up, more to prove the other sides point than help really.

1) I clenched my teeth and voted by party, although I couldn't say I was surprised by the outcome - and here I am doing the exact thing by making it clear I didn't vote for him - sigh.

> would love to know how someone would do a study on the subject

It's normally called the "Shy Tory Factor" in the UK; Wikipedia has a page [1] but it's a bit thin.

After the 2015 GE the British Polling Council commissioned an independent inquiry on the subject, whose findings you can read here [2]. (Disclaimer: I haven't.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_Factor

[2] http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/3789/1/Report_final_revised.pdf

What strikes me is how counterproductive this all is - in this week's case the inaccurate polling made the final result far more of a shock and thus presumably far more disruptive than it would otherwise have been. It may even have caused the final result - I think turnout for the under-25 demographic, which skewed heavily Remain, was only about a third, and I've seen several comments to the effect of "I didn't think I needed to vote, Remain was ahead anyway".

I've seen several comments to the effect of "I didn't think I needed to vote, Remain was ahead anyway".

I've even seen someone explain (on the BBC): "I didn't think my vote mattered, so I voted leave. I'm a bit worried now".

I really hope that that's a minor occurrence, I really don't want to consider the possibility that large parts of the voting public treat elections/referenda with less seriousness than the average talent show vote.

Nothing I've seen points to that being anything more than BBC spin. According to this poll [1] 4% of Remain voters are happy with the outcome while 1% of Leave voters are unhappy with it.

[1] https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/746820394217259008

(Caveat - it says "via ComRes" but it hasn't appeared in ComRes' published polls page yet.)

In an era where every quack with an opinion is broadcasting it online, the media can basically concoct whatever narrative they want by choosing to elevate a few people's ramblings to the level of news.

An honest headline for a lot of the news in the past couple days is "People on losing side of election unhappy". But then people would realize how stupid it is. And when the news is about people's reaction to the news, you begin to wonder what the real cause and effect is.

In normal UK elections, due to first-past-the-post-per-district, people are used to their vote not counting.

As an American, that's why I'm kind of shocked that this kind of issue only required a simple majority. Usually out in the states a change of this magnitude requires a super-majority. For example, to ban guns in the US would require a two thirds majority of states to be for.

in the US, concealing unpopular opinions from pollsters is known as the "Bradley effect". It was massively over-diagnosed in 2008 and 2012, but seems to be back in play now.

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