Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

The Sun, Not the Rain, Tipped the U.K. Vote

Polls and betting markets failed to predict the impact of emotional appeals from the U.K's popular press.

June 24, 2016 at 11:51 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

It was The Sun 'what on it.'
Photographer: Luke MacGregor

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Leighton Vaughan Williams, a professor at Nottingham Business School who specializes in betting research, has long held that betting markets are better predictors of election outcomes than polls. Yet ahead of the U.K. vote on whether to leave the European Union, the bookies failed as miserably as pollsters to predict the result -- actually, they did much worse. At certain points on Thursday, the probability of a "remain" vote implied by betting odds stood at 90 percent.

When I asked Vaughan Williams what had happened, he gave a surprising answer for a believer in the wisdom of markets: