Volume 39, Number 9 · May 14, 1992
Goodbye to All That
By Peter Jenkins
Students of opinion polls were surprised by the outcome of the British general election but students of history should not have been. Politicians, it appears, are not the only people who tell lies at election time. The opinion polls were universally and spectacularly wrong, and not, although this is their favorite excuse, simply because they failed to measure the full force of a late swing to the government. They were wrong because throughout the three-week campaign they failed to catch the deep ambivalence of voters as they pondered how to cast their ballots.
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