Why banning polls would be a bad idea

Welcome to the 136th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which takes a look at the debate on banning polls kicked off by a new book about the 2024 general election.

Then it’s a summary of the latest national voting intention polls and a round-up of party leader ratings, followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis, including what the polling tells us about the farmer protests.

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Want to know more about political polling? Get my book Polling UnPacked: the history, uses and abuses of political opinion polling.

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Should political polls be banned?

“Ban the polls: UK election strategists slam ‘inaccurate’ voter surveys”: that was the headline this week on Politico’s coverage of a new book on the 2024 general election. As they reported:

Opinion polls are inaccurate, distort political debate and should be banned during the final weeks of an election campaign. That’s the view of the strategist who led the British Conservative Party’s operations in 2024 and 2019.  

In an interview for a new book on this year’s U.K. general election, Tory campaign director Isaac Levido slammed the “unhealthy” dominance of polling in the media coverage of the campaign, which his side lost to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in July.

Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, who directed Labour’s successful election bid, also sees the argument for a moratorium on publishing polls in the run-up to voting, according to Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election. 

The first part of that claim - that the polls are inaccurate - I’ve already tackled. You can read my two-parter on how the polls did pretty well at the 2024 general election and there is also longer-term, multi-county evidence too. Again, it shows that polls are pretty accurate and, if anything, getting more accurate.

But what about banning polls even if you concede they are more accurate than an Isaac Levido prediction?

Opinion Polls 1 - 0 Isaac Levido

I tackled that issue in my book about polling, Polling UnPacked: The History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls so here is a slightly edited and expanded extract on why no, polls should not be banned.

The case against banning polls

In semi-democracies, and especially in non-democracies, political opinion polling is often restricted by authoritarians not wishing the public to know what the public thinks.

Although that itself might give those in functioning democracies pause for thought about banning polls, that has not put off talk of - and in many other countries, action to introduce - a ban political polls in the run-up to polling day.

Two fears have primarily driven such pressure. The first is a fear that polling is wrong, and hence pollutes election debates and coverage. This is why talk of regulation often spikes after an election in which pollsters are perceived to have done a bad job. But, as we have seen, polling is not only pretty accurate, it also stands up extremely well against the accuracy of the other measures that would otherwise have to be relied on.

The second fear is that publishing information on the popularity of parties or candidates overshadows what (in the view of the would-be banners) elections should be about.

Even granted that this overshadowing occurs and is a bad thing, it is a brave move to suggest that the way to get people to pay less attention to something is to ban it. Such bans can be spectacularly counter-productive, as Barbara Streisand can attest.

It is also a brave notion to think that even if there was no polling data around, political campaigns would become all about the worthy or the serious, with media coverage converted to sober, careful analysis of policy details. The media (often reflecting, to be fair, the preferences of its audiences) finds plenty of lighter content to fill up coverage on a whole range of topics where serious coverage is possible but polling is not available. If there was the desire and the demand for such political coverage now, the mere publication of some polls would not get in the way.

It is also notable that those arguing that banning polls makes for a better politics are short of rigorous evidence from countries with such bans that their politics is indeed better as a result.¹

But even if you feel doubly brave and unencumbered by that absence of evidence, there is a further problem: if you ban polls you also have to think that we will be better off if voters do not have accurate information on the relative popularity of parties or candidates. This is the view of accurate polling as a forbidden fruit, coming from a rather patrician attitude towards democracy: you are free to vote, but can only think about the things that I decide are important.

It means arguing that, for example, a voter wanting polling data to help inform their choice of who is best placed to beat the government’s MP in their constituency is doing something so unworthy that deliberately obstructing their wish for helpful information is acceptable.

What is more, banning good information leaves the field open to bad information. Rather, the more good-quality information voters have, the better. If voters want to use good information on the relative support for parties or candidates to help decide how to vote, who are you or I to tell them they should only have inferior information instead?

Another argument is one of practicality. Banning public polls does not stop polling happening, and often leaking via the online world. (And if you think the answer to that is to make it illegal for people to participate in polls: good luck with the idea of trying to successfully criminalise people in thousands of different locations around the whole country clicking boxes on online surveys served up from overseas.)

All bans do is restrict polling to those who can afford it, such as hedge funds who can make large sums of money by predicting election results accurately. The rich are able to circumvent polling bans, and the select insiders are appeal to pick up the whispered findings, while ordinary people are left with inferior information.

Cheeky workarounds can provide nudge-nudge wink-wink clues as to what those secret polls say, as Lewis Baston points out:

I was amused to learn of the phenomenon in Poland where ‘market prices for fruit and veg that correlate to parties’ were published in the run up to polling day. Information finds a way, and I prefer legal regular above board polling to any of the other ways it could work.

Even then, though, those fruit and veg prices come without fieldwork² dates and other basic information that elevates the value of polling data. Nor does everyone get to take part in the club. It is still a policy of divide and dumb down: some get the full information, some get some information and most are deliberately put in the dark.

Or, to quote the pollster who is quoted at length in Landslide and who is the most critical of the performance of the polls at the general election, even he says:

A final argument against polling bans is that being able to conduct a poll just before polling day is helpful for the health of political polling overall. It is those late polls which can be most usefully compared against actual election results and so can show up problems in polling methodology. Without such checks, political polling is working blind. (Though to apply my own standards to myself: while I have heard British pollsters put this case strongly, they have not presented data that shows polling is more accurate in countries without such bans than it is in countries with such bans. So do not rest too heavily on this argument.)

But some bans are sensible

A subset of polling bans applies specifically to (not) publishing the results from exit polls before the polls close. These are based on a different, and more defensible, fear that knowing how the actual voting is going in a contest is much more likely to risk putting people of voting (because their side is winning easily or doomed).

Moreover, with exit polls much smaller in number and constrained to a short period of time, there is a greater risk of a wayward individual poll being unduly misleading without a chance for other or subsequent polls to clarify matters.

Whether legislative or self-regulatory, exit poll bans are not perfect – as the early leaking of exit poll data on the day of voting in past US presidential elections shows. But such leaks are generally restricted to the most politically engaged and have a record of inaccuracy, further reducing their impact.

The equalising power of polling

Returning to the idea of banning ordinary, rather than exit, polls, the pragmatic arguments against are strong and the principled ones powerful.

Yet to my mind the most important argument against is one of equity.

Opinion polls are fundamentally democratic: one person, one say. As political scientist Sidney Verba put it: "Surveys produce just what democracy is supposed to produce – equal representation of all citizens."

You may have wealth, be the friend of a newspaper owner, go to Royal Ascot with the chief executive of a multinational, spend summer weeks sailing in the Hamptons, be in a WhatsApp group with a senior public official or have been to school with the Prime Minister, but none of these perks gives you an extra say in a properly conducted political opinion poll.

Political polls are to politics what jury selection is to the legal system. When done properly, both are levellers that force fairness past the inequalities of society.

Banning polls diverts the power of knowledge and the power to express their views to the rich, the influential and the insiders. Promoting polling spreads the power of knowledge and the power to express their views to everyone.

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You can get Polling UnPacked from Bookshop.org (independent bookshops), Waterstones, Amazon (including Kindle version) or direct from the publisher.

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Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election, the book which triggered the piece above, is the next book up for review on my sibling email list, The books of the 2024 general election. You can sign up for free and will get my review of the whole book once I’ve read it:

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Voting intentions and leadership ratings

Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates:

Next, a summary of the the leadership ratings, sorted by name of pollster:

For more details, and updates as each new poll comes out, see my regularly updated tables here and follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.

For the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.

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Last week’s edition

More graphs, more American analysis.

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The same Ipsos poll brings both good and bad news for Labour, and other polling news

The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are for paying subscribers only, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.

1. It’s a poll of two halves for Labour with the latest Ipsos Political Monitor as it