1 election where the final polls got the result badly wrong. Each deep dive sets out what the polls said, what happened, what the official inquiries and the pollsters found, what our own data shows, and what the pollsters changed afterwards. Every one of these misses is in the record our forecasts learn from.
How far out the final polls were
The error on the lead between the top two: the final polls' average against the result, in points.
The final polls had the CDU/CSU on 41.5% and eight points clear of the SPD; it won 35.2% and finished less than a point ahead. Every institute overstated the Union by 5.8 to 6.8 points, and their own analyses found a late swing of Union-leaning voters to the FDP that the broadcasters' polls were not allowed to publish.
For each country we measure how far the final polls missed at past elections. We take half the average miss off today's polls only where that would have made past forecasts better, testing each election without knowing its result; elsewhere the polls stand as published. Every forecast then runs thousands of simulated elections with polling errors the size of these, so a miss like the ones above is inside our ranges, not a surprise. Polls against results, every election · Our forecast record · Pollster leaderboard
Germany · 18 September 2005
7.2 pts