Boris Johnson's Victory
The contest for Mayor of London has generated the most interest of any election this year, with the possible exception of the race for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Turnout in London was 45%, well up on the last contest four years ago of 36.9%.
This 45% turnout was far less than the 61% of Londoners registered to vote who told Ipsos's interviewers last week that they were "absolutely certain to vote". If all the people who said they were sure to vote had actually voted, turnout would have topped three million, and it's likely that the Mayor of the last eight years, Ken Livingstone, would still be in office.
Instead, the Conservative Party candidate Boris Johnson's victory in the 2008 London Mayoral election suggests that the continuing avalanche of negative publicity about Livingstone during the campaign coupled with the unpopularity of Gordon Brown and Labour across the country contributed to the Tory candidate's win.
Ipsos's polls throughout the campaign, like all the other published telephone polls, by ICM and MRUK, showed support for Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone so evenly divided that neither candidate ever had a statistically significant lead, so that in polling terms the contest was then always "too close to call". Mr Johnson's eventual victory was more convincing than these polls implied and it is clear, although the detailed figures are not yet available, that the differential turnout between outer London, which massively supported Boris Johnson, and inner London, which supported Ken Livingstone, made the difference.
The last Ipsos poll was completed a week before the election, and was not in any sense a "prediction". In fact, in that poll 22% said after expressing their voting intention that they "might change their mind between then (a week before the election) and polling day".
As the late former Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously said, "a week is a long time in politics". Election polls are always at the mercy of any late swings of opinion (at the last general election nearly a quarter of voters said they made up their minds on how to vote in the final week of the campaign, and one in ten in the final 24 hours of polling day). For that reason, veteran pollster Bob Worcester, founder of MORI, has often said, "the poll that polls best, polls last".
We will be examining what we can learn from the performance of the telephone polls (and those of others like MRUK) in the Mayoral election, and in particular, why empirically, they appear to have tended to over-estimate the Labour share of the vote, review our approach, and publish our conclusions in several months time.
More analysis of the issues facing Boris Johnson as mayor and the issues involved in the polling is available .
