News and Insights

Verian produces most accurate polling of 2024 UK General Election

Written by Craig Watkins | Jul 5, 2024 6:00:00 AM

After an eventful night of counts and recounts, we now have the 2024 general election results from all but two of the 632 constituencies in Great Britain. The Labour party has won a very large majority of the seats but with a surprisingly small share of the vote (35%).

At Verian, we carried out weekly polls throughout the campaign period using our Public Voice panel. This panel has a random sample base and is used primarily for social research that must stand up to detailed scrutiny. We chose it as our vehicle for election surveys because we strongly believed that this kind of sampling protocol would yield the most accurate results.

We are pleased to say that Verian’s pre-election survey was the most accurate of the twenty final polls published by British Polling Council members, vindicating our choice of sample source.[1] The chart below shows our estimates for each party’s share of the vote, the formal margins of error enclosing each estimate, and the true share revealed this morning.

We would like to thank the members of our Public Voice panel for their exceptional contribution to our work, not least their honesty with respect to such a private matter.

[1] Accuracy measured by the mean error across seven vote shares: Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Reform UK, Greens, SNP, plus a single additional category covering all other parties that obtained less than two per cent of the vote.

Methodological information

For our final poll, a total of 2,135 interviews were conducted online among adults living in Great Britain between the afternoon of the 28th June and the morning of 1st July 2024. The survey data tables and further details on the methodological approach and weighting can be found on the Verian website.

Our sample was drawn from Verian’s random sample panel Public Voice. This panel is used extensively for social research commissioned by government, academic and third sector organisations, including those based in the US and Europe. Membership of this panel is restricted to those living in a controlled sample of UK addresses drawn from the Royal Mail’s master database. This restrictive method of panel-building is relatively expensive but will ordinarily provide benefits in terms of sample and data quality when compared with a panel that any adult resident in the UK can join. Although the short-period fieldwork web-only protocol used for this poll is more limited than is typical for a social research survey, the demographic and political composition of the sample is only modestly degraded compared to what could be obtained using the full social research data collection protocol (two to three weeks using both web and telephone interview modes).

The data was weighted to match population totals for age, gender, 2019 General Election voting patterns, 2016 EU referendum voting patterns, education, region, and likelihood to vote in the next General Election.

 

Media enquiries

For further information on any of the data and findings from the report please contact Lois.Taylor@veriangroup.com or PressEnquiries@veriangroup.com