When Britain votes in the July 4 general election, one person will probably know the result before anyone else.
John Curtice, a professor of political science at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, will spend Election Day with his team refining the results of a national exit poll. At 10 p.m., before the results are counted, he will make a big, bold prediction that will be announced on national television: the winner.
“The good thing about the period between 10:00 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. is that no one knows!” Professor Curtice said with a smile, raising his hands in the air. “It’s that time when we don’t really have a government.”
While he is right that no one will know the final count until the results come in from all of Britain’s 650 constituencies, in the last six general elections his team’s exit poll has proven to be surprisingly accurate, always correctly predicting which It will be the biggest game. In five of the six, the margin of error for that forecast was five parliamentary seats or less.
That background is part of what has made the 70-year-old professor, with his formidable intellect, unruly locks of white hair and infectious enthusiasm, an unlikely media star. But his beloved status in Britain runs deeper. He is outspoken and scrupulously nonpartisan, making him a rarity in an era of polarization: a trusted source of information across the political spectrum.
“I try to speak humanly. “I’m trying to speak in a way that the general public will understand,” she told the New York Times over a frugal tuna sandwich lunch in the atrium beneath the BBC studios in Westminster.
“Sometimes I kick one party and other times I kick the other,” he said. “And I usually kick them both.”
‘You don’t have time to think about going to sleep’
In February, as broadcasters awaited the results of special elections in two parliamentary constituencies, Professor Curtice stood in front of the television lights at 10pm as a BBC news producer adjusted his headset.
His analysis was characteristically fluid, as were the 20 other interviews he completed during a night of television appearances that stretched into breakfast time the next day.
Fueled by a coffee and a bowl of porridge consumed around 6am in the BBC cafeteria, he then headed to the station’s radio studios, continuing a media blitz that ended at 4pm. It was an exhausting and exhilarating 18 hours.
“You don’t have time to think about going to sleep; it’s adrenaline, it’s intellectual excitement, it’s an intellectual challenge,” he said.
However, he comes prepared, with his laptop packed with data from previous elections, records that may or may not be broken, and his thoughts on how to summarize the most likely scenarios.
Professor Curtice’s earliest political memory is of the election of Harold Wilson as leader of the opposition Labor Party in 1963. He was nine years old. A year later, he was allowed to stay up late on the night of the general election, when Wilson won a slim majority, bringing the Labor Party to power for the first time in 13 years.
“Don’t ask me why, I just found it interesting,” he said.
He grew up in Cornwall, on the rugged coast of south-west England. His father worked in construction, her mother was a part-time market researcher and the family was prosperous enough to own a detached house with a large garden (but no central heating).
At Oxford University, where he studied politics, philosophy and economics, Professor Curtice was a contemporary of Tony Blair, who became prime minister, but their paths did not cross. While Blair played in a rock band called Ugly Rumours, a young Professor Curtice was a choral scholar who spent two hours a day singing vespers.
As a postgraduate, his mentor, David Butler, a leading figure in British political science who conducted the country’s first exit poll, urged him to acquire “statistical literacy.”
His first election night television appearance was in 1979, the night Margaret Thatcher came to power. Armed with a calculator he had programmed himself, he provided Professor Butler with statistical backup in case the BBC’s mainframe computer failed.
However, it was the exit polls that really made Professor Curtice famous. He first participated in 1992, and he later told The Guardian that it was “not a happy experience” because the poll predicted a hung parliament rather than the modest 21-vote majority that John Major won for the Conservatives.
Since 2001, a new model he created with David Firth, another academic, has improved the accuracy of forecasts, sometimes to the displeasure of politicians. In 2015, Paddy Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, vowed to eat his hat if the exit poll prediction that his party would retain just 10 of his nearly 60 seats proved correct. He actually earned less. The next night, on a television programme, Mr Ashdown was presented with a chocolate cake shaped like a hat.
Today, the exit poll is jointly commissioned by three national broadcasters: the BBC, ITV and Sky News. On July 4, tens of thousands of voters across the country will receive a mock ballot as they leave polling stations and will be asked to privately mark how they voted.
In 2017, the poll correctly predicted that, instead of increasing her majority in Parliament, as she and many analysts expected, Theresa May had lost it. In 2019, the projected size of Boris Johnson’s majority was off by just three seats.
However, Professor Curtice is not complacent and points out that unexpected changes are always possible, such as in 2015 when the exit poll projected a hung Parliament, but David Cameron achieved a slim majority. “People think there is some magic, but we are only as good as the data,” Professor Curtice said.
“Very, very highly unlikely”
Exit polls are more complicated when elections are close. This time, the Conservative Party, which has been in power for 14 years, has trailed the opposition Labor Party in opinion polls by about 20 points for 18 months. While these leads typically narrow in the final weeks of a campaign, the Conservatives would need to make modern electoral history to win.
Professor Curtice estimates his chances of forming the next government at less than 5 per cent: “the point that statisticians get to: it’s very, very highly unlikely.” He adds that this is partly because, even if the Conservatives exceed expectations and the result is a hung parliament, they lack allies to keep them in power as a minority government.
Honored with a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 2017, Professor Curtice is now famous enough to be greeted by strangers on the street. His name is trending on social media on election nights, and there is a tribute account on X dedicated to tracking his media appearances called “Is Sir John Curtice on TV?(At this point, the answer is usually “Yes.”)
Could this be his last television appearance in the general election? That, she said, is something he will consider after the vote. “If the next election is in five years, I will be 75 years old, and who knows?”
But for now the country needs it. “There are a lot of experts who know a lot but can’t translate it in a way that is clear to the audience,” BBC news presenter Nicky Schiller said after interviewing Professor Curtice on the night of the February special election. And he added: “It’s a pleasure to work with him.”