That Ashcroft Newark by election poll has Tory HQ and their media drones at the Telegraph and Spectator ordering extra bottles of champagne.
Purple tide pushed back…..UKIP stuffed……earthquake fails to appear….Brogan & co are dancing with glee….
But are our pollsters reliable predictors of UKIP by election performance?
UKIP, of course, have never managed to win a Westminster constituency either in a general or a by-election. Their best performance was the 27.8% at Eastleigh in February last year.
It is important to recall that all the polls in that contest, as the chart shows, understated the purples by quite some margin. None of them had UKIP any higher than third place.
It was a similar pattern in Corby in November 2012 when the Tories were trying to hang on to the seat following Louise Mensch’s decision to quit politics. The final Ashcroft poll had UKIP on just 6% – they ended up on 14.3%.
Maybe the Tories should just hold back on those champagne orders until the votes are actually counted……
