In Clacton, it’s a warm July day and Nigel Farage has taken a break from his byelection campaign to sip champagne with Reform UK staff and supporters. He’s celebrating a run of opinion polls that had helped put the party’s narrative about winning over Labour voters on the front pages of national newspapers.
There’s nothing unusual about a politician enthusing over a positive polling outcome, but these are unusual circumstances. The people sitting across the table from Farage are undercover journalists posing as a wealthy American family keen to help Reform by using a front company to pay for the polls.
“It worked, boom! And for a relatively modest investment,” Farage is recorded saying of the £30,000 that had been used to fund the polls, with the apparent aim of benefiting Reform.
When investigative outfit Verbatim broke this story on Britain’s Channel 4 in early September, it triggered serious repercussions for Reform and the pollster who conducted the research, JL Partners.
It is primarily a story about the efforts some are taking to bypass electoral laws and how deep pockets can be used to influence the public narrative. Sadly, it also served to feed distrust of polling and media.
Prior to this story dropping, JL Partners had a pretty good reputation. It was known for having produced some of the most accurate polling of the 2024 election in the United States.
The problem in the United Kingdom case doesn’t seem to have been with the polling numbers themselves. There have been no claims that JL Partners fiddled with its methodology to generate a certain result, and the findings they reported were all seen to be within the realms of credibility. Instead, the failure was one of transparency. That someone has paid for a poll doesn’t necessarily mean its results are inaccurate – a pollster that has built a sound reputation has a strong incentive not to deliver results that would undermine it. But the audience should know about any payment, so they can make up their own minds.
The JL Partners matter is now under investigation by both the Metropolitan Police and the relevant industry bodies, the Market Research Society and the British Polling Council. The BPC has said its code of conduct was clearly breached; JL Partners now calls the episode “a lapse of judgement”.
We know … that trust in institutions has been falling in an environment of economic inequality and persistent misinformation from bad faith actors. It’s more vital than ever for pollsters to maintain integrity and for the media to play their part in ensuring transparency.
We at the Australian Polling Council are watching the investigations closely to see if any changes to our code of conduct are needed to prevent a similar incident happening here.
Of course, no code of conduct, nor any law, is a complete guarantee against rogue operators doing the wrong thing.
However, the repercussions from the British example should serve as a warning to any pollster who considers doing the same: JL Partners have damaged their reputation.
It should also serve as a warning to media outlets. Britain’s Daily Telegraph, which characterised one of the polls as being conducted “for the Telegraph”, despite it having been paid for by someone else, was at least partially complicit in this scandal.
Pollsters and media outlets play a similar role in society: both shine a light on how society perceives itself and the world. It’s a highly privileged position, and it comes with a responsibility.
We know from polls conducted across the world that trust in institutions has been falling in an environment of economic inequality and persistent misinformation from bad faith actors.
It’s more vital than ever for pollsters to maintain integrity and for the media to play their part in ensuring transparency.
Transparency in polling goes beyond disclosing who has paid for it. The Australian Polling Council requires all member organisations to include certain details in any publication of public polling that is political in nature – such as exploring voting intentions or attitudes to policy issues.
These details include who commissioned the poll and the end client, along with when and how it was conducted, whether by phone calls, internet panels – where respondents are paid for their time – text or another method. It’s also important to include the number of people surveyed and the effective sample size; that is, the effective number of respondents after the sample is weighted to demographic data to best represent all voters, along with the demographic variables (such as age and gender) used. Among other key information is the wording of questions and preambles, in the order they were presented. This information may seem like minutiae, but the methodology reporting requirements allow published polls to be scrutinised and compared. They shed light on how the researchers have arrived at their numbers and the methodological differences between polls. Importantly, they allow readers to decide for themselves the credibility of those surveys.
In Australia, we are fortunate to have informed and independent poll commentary – most notably Kevin Bonham, who is well known to any political enthusiast on X or BlueSky, William Bowe from The Poll Bludger, Ben Raue from The Tally Room and Professor Murray Goot from Macquarie University.
Our members include 89 Degrees East, DemosAU, Essential Research, Fox & Hedgehog, Ipsos, Lonergan Research, National Field Services, Pyxis (which runs Newspoll), SEC Newgate, The Australia Institute, TKW Research, uComms and YouGov.
These member organisations have agreed to publish the required information in the form of a long methodology statement, which can be found on our websites, and carry the Polling Council’s quality mark.
Of the pollsters who are not members, some, like Accent Research, generally adhere to the requirements of the code anyway, but others still fall short. Sadly, there are still major polls released regularly that do not provide all the relevant information, making it harder for someone to fairly assess their work.
I would urge those organisations that have decided not to publish this information to take the opportunity to reconsider. In my opinion, these organisations are not deliberately trying to mislead but have formed a view that maintaining a level of secrecy around their methodology gives them a competitive advantage.
This argument does not hold water. A credible review of polling in Australia, or any country, would show there is no special secret to accurate polling that is exclusive to any particular organisation – no matter how hard we all try.
I can say that adhering to the APC’s Code of Conduct and being transparent about our methodology has only helped the business I’m a part of, DemosAU, to become better pollsters. Knowing that our criteria will be picked apart by poll-watchers is just further motivation to stay on top of our game. I’m sure most polling council members feel the same.
The media also has a part to play. While it’s unreasonable to expect individual journalists who only occasionally engage with polling to be experts in the nuances of research methodologies, we do urge them to make sure this information is made publicly available before they agree to publish a poll.
In fact, it is the longstanding position of the APC that any poll that does not adhere to our code of conduct – regardless of whether the organisation is an APC member – should not be published.
On the other hand, transparency does not guarantee accuracy – I wouldn’t want to mislead people on that front. It’s perfectly possible to be completely open about your methodology and still be off the mark.
As most people know, the 2019 federal election was a notable miss for the polling community, though recent state elections in South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland were high points, as was the 2022 federal election.
That’s the nature of polling – even those with the best track records will have their misses. Capturing and measuring shifts in public opinion isn’t always easy. Nonetheless, the best thing we can do as pollsters is to be clear about our approach and honest about polling’s limitations – such as the margin of error that should be taken into account with any poll report.
Australia is generally well served by its polling industry. Most of us, frankly, are political or data nerds who just want to get an accurate picture of what’s going on in our society, while also dealing with the challenges of running a business. Transparency is not something our industry should fear.