Poll Tracker Methodology

The various Britain Elects poll trackers you see on our site and elsewhere are designed to cut through the noise and provide an easy-on-the-eye summary of where British public opinion stands.

The trackers start as simple linear moving averages but are modified with additional weightings to account for factors such as sample size and publication date.

We weight according to sample size. There is little difference between a reasonable 1,000 person sample size or something larger, but because with a larger sample you can be more confident in viewing representative data in the cross-breaks, we weight them higher.
Prolific pollsters are weighted down. Our tracker seeks to measure all pollsters. We weight down pollsters which publish more regularly than others to avoid one pollster saturating results.
We weight by publication date. Newly published polls have a higher weighting in our tracker than older polls.

We do not yet weight according to a pollster’s record in previous elections.