This is the election of MRP polls – but what are they and why are they showing such different results?

By Stuart Wilks-Heeg, Head of Politics, University of Liverpool

I say, I say, I say, when is a poll not a poll? When it’s a multilevel regression with post-stratification (MRP) model!

I won’t be joining the comedy circuit with that one. But this truly awful gag has a point. MRPs have become a fixture of modern election campaigns, alongside conventional opinion polling. Importantly, they aren’t the same thing as opinion polls. They do use polling data – a lot of it, as it happens – but they are not quite the same thing.

Election obsessives will remember where they were when the first ever MRP landed for a UK election. For everyone else,…

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