The shy-Tory effect made 1992 polls spectacularly wrong

Evidence

The two most obvious parallels for this election would seem to be 1974 — a weak Labour government, propped up by smaller parties, or, ominously, 1992, with Labour crushingly defeated by John Major’s Tories after they were expected to win. Shaun Lawson makes a strong and convincing case for why today might turn out to be a re-run of 1992. Much of this is to do with the unreliability of polls. Because of the so-called “shy Tory” phenomenon — voters not admitting to pollsters that they would vote Conservative — the polls were spectacularly wrong in 1992. Major didn’t only win, the Tories ended up with the largest amount of votes ever cast for a political party in Britain. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1832

Categorization

• XREF: Counters the book’s running theme that ideology needs no surface believers — the shy-Tory poll distortion is a case where concealment of stated preference does change real outcomes.