TWO THEORIES ON WHETHER THE BREXIT POLLS WERE WRONG. Leonid Bershidsky presents the theory here on the Bloomberg website that the Brexit polls were not wrong. Rather, there was a sudden last minute swing of voters, too late for the pollsters to pick up. This massive shift by voters was driven by The Sun and the Daily Mail, two mass market tabloids. Bershidsky quotes Professor Vaughn Williams, a specialist in voting research, who says: “the impact these mass distribution tabloid papers have on the popular psyche, especially in whipping up emotion, is difficult to overestimate.”
On the other hand, Nate Silver at the 538 site tweeted here that UK polls are not very good (“have a dodgy history”) and yet the results of the election were within the margin of error of the polls, which is plus or minus 4 %. Silver also pointed out in his stream of tweets that the polls showed a close race, a “toss-up” so that the “Leave” result should not have been surprising. Yet the betting made “Remain” a strong favorite.