Hats off to the Pollsters; they called it. They successfully predicted the future and prepared us all for the 2024 UK General Election result. As far as I know, none of the polling firms used a time-travelling DeLorean to do this.

What they did do was work incredibly hard, using their skills, experience, and technical know-how to develop methodologies, questions, models, and data sets that gave them the confidence to tell the world how it was going to be. This is a tremendous and inspiring achievement that all of us in the market research industry should celebrate.

Market research is a broad church that very much includes political polling. It’s possibly the most showbiz part of the research world as its practitioners often pop up in the media to provide insight into the latest political manoeuvring. Despite this fame and media exposure, I’ve never known a pollster let it go to their head and demand exclusive access to the third shelf of the office fridge. They’re usually very humble, hard-working, passionate and heavily caffeinated as they race to meet a deadline before dashing off to a networking event to find out the latest Westminster gossip.

It is possibly one of the toughest gigs in the market research world and has become a vocation for those who are drawn to it. Results and predictions are heavily scrutinised, methodologies are critiqued, and politicians often lambast pollsters should the polling results not be to their liking. Agencies that self-publish polling gain tremendous mainstream media attention, which can be very advantageous, but any error can result in reputational damage, which is hard to recover from. There is also an element of machismo as a “poll-off” develops with agencies competing to beat one another to deliver the most accurate results and prove that their method is superior to others.

There will, undoubtedly, be some nuance and closer inspection will reveal some elements that didn’t pan out as they predicted, but the overriding sense is of a job well done. They got the gist, and the robust evidence they gathered informed us throughout the campaign and over the preceding months that Labour would enjoy a landslide victory.

There’s an awful lot of pressure on the shoulders of pollsters to get it right, and there’s a really short window for when their work is relevant. They rarely get the recognition they deserve. All of us in the market research industry should congratulate them and celebrate that their diligence and expertise provided the evidence that so accurately predicted the future.

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