of publishing it, because it looked too different to the polls others were publishing (including their own earlier polls): http://survation.com/snatching-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory/
The exit poll got it close to right - they reckoned 316 Tory MPs, compare dto the 330/331 they will get; a lot close than the 280-290 the previous polls had predicted.
No, no redistricting problems; boundaries are drawn by non-political commissions, and have to roughly follow existing boundaries for counties, city and town limits, and local council wards. In fact, there was a regular redistricting scheduled for a few years ago, and the Tories had proposed cutting the number of MPs from 650 to 600, which would have meant a comprehensive redrawing (including eliminating the smaller average numbers of voters in Welsh constituencies, which tends to favour Labour), which was thought would help the Tories (the pattern of population movement tends to mean the Tories benefit from recently-drawn boundaries). But some Tories then blocked the reform of the House of Lords (ie voting for the damn thing) that their Lib Dem partners had been pushing as their voting reform; in retaliation, the Lib Dems said 'screw cutting the number of seats, we're blocking that', so the boundaries haven't changed since 2010.
Turnout was 66.1%, the highest since 1997.
What may have happened is the return of the 'Shy Tory' phenomenon:
The question of why the pre-election national polls were so far off on the Labour-Conservative margin in 2015 is going to be the subject of extensive investigation over the coming weeks and months. We simply do not know what went wrong yet. The error appears to have been nearly the same magnitude as in 1992, and in the same “Shy Tory” direction. The 1992 error led to a lengthy period of internal assessment within the British polling industry. That error led to, among other changes, a push by many pollsters to use political rather than just demographic weighting (past vote or party identification), but 2015 shows that this is still far from a panacea. As Kieran Pedley noted before the election, the upheavals in British politics in the last few years gave some reason to fear another big polling error in 2015. At the moment, while we have a pretty good idea of why the exit poll tends to work well, we do not have a very good idea of why the pre-election telephone and online polls have proved so unreliable in British general elections.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/05/08/what-happened-with-the-british-election-polls/Or:
Voters surrender to their inner bastard
MILLIONS of voters have admitted they are bastards who just want money.
Following a close-fought election campaign, the electorate decided the prospect of having money was better than the prospect of not having it.
Tom Booker, from Southampton, said: “I like money. I like how it feels in my hands. Labour had some lovely things to say about society, but I don’t actually care about any of that because it’s not money.
“I promise I will do nice things with some of the money. I’ll buy Ed Miliband’s autobiography even though I’m going to put it straight in the bin.”
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/voters-surrender-to-their-inner-bastard-2015050898124
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