The night after the election, one can conclude that all pollsters in the Netherlands did a bad job of predicting the election results. All polls were at least off by 20 seats (out of 150), and I expect the newspapers to make headlines of this in the next days. See the table below for the final predictions (before election day), the exit poll and final election results. The last row shows how much each poll was off (in the number of seats
Many opinion pollers do badly when it comes to predicting elections. This is mainly because they let their respondents self-select them into their polls. So what, who cares? The polls make for some good entertainment and easily fill the talk-shows on television. If everyone knows they cannot be trusted, why care?
We should care. In the Dutch electoral system - with poportional respresentation - every vote counts. If only a small percentage of voters lets their vote depend on the polls of the election result, this can result in shifts of several seats in parliament.