The [U.K.] Telegraph columnist Janet Daley went out on a limb and correctly predicted a Tory victory, even as the polls showed a tight race and even a slight edge for Labour. Why did the polls get it so wrong.
Well, obviously people told the pollsters they were undecided when in fact they had very much made up their minds to vote Conservative. But why was that? I think Daley nails it:
Somehow we have arrived at a point where the conscientiously held beliefs and values of the majority of the population have become a matter for secret shame. The desire to do as well as you can in life, to develop your potential and expect to be rewarded for it, to provide your family with the greatest possible opportunity for self-improvement and to do that on your own without being dependent on the state – these are the assumptions that seem to have become so unacceptable that identifying with them is beyond the pale, or at least so socially outrageous that it is not worth the ignominy of admitting to them.
This has resonance for us in the U.S., where the desire to do as well as you can is now also regarded as questionable (unless of course you are going to do well in one of the progressive-approved fields of endeavor, which just about rules out free-market ventures).