Tagged: polls
A serving of crow, best eaten promptly
After listening to wrongness guru Kathryn Schultz‘s TED talk on the counterintuitive blessings of making mistakes, it seems an opportune moment to get this out of the way. A quiet but astute observer of provincial and national politics writes:
I meant to ask you where you get your drugs from. They are obviously very powerful. I mean, how else can you explain your federal election campaign outcome prediction?
That would be this prediction:
I look forward to their stories a month from now acknowledging April 12 as the turning point when a majority slipped from Harper’s grasp, and a minority Liberal Government became a real possibility.
The post-debate polls are mixed, and mostly flat. They certainly reveal no such turning point. The only real change seems to be a startling rise in soft support for Jack Layton in the unlikely province of Quebec, where he has taken over second place in most polls. Whether this translates into many, or any, seats is an open question, since the NDP vote in the province is inefficient, in the sense of being too evenly spread among many ridings to produce majorities under Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system.
Another friend, a Nova Scotian by inclination currently suffering asylum in Toronto, summed up the election this way:
Isn’t this campaign awful? Layton, my MP, seems to be winning ever since the debate, heaven help us. I have a feeling anything could happen. Two events stand out.
One was the televised English debate, in which only Layton seemed authentic. The other was the Ignatieff interview with Peter Mansbridge today. For a generation over 40, Mansbridge represents something along the lines of Walter Cronkite — the guy who presides at the campfire, the embodiment of Canadian centrality. He’ll be the last one, of course, since now everyone’s a short-lived broadcaster, but to watch his cold, barely concealed contempt for the actor and nimble intellect before him was to realize that even at the top of his considerable game, Ignatieff isn’t achieving acceptance — which is what the polls seem to show, however faulty they may be: he hasn’t moved the dial much.
The other: I spent some of today rapt, watching Day 1 of SUN-TV. It’s lunatic. Prewar Germany. Sex and death. The Americanization of Canada, in the worst imaginable way. How did the country ever beget this Rosemary’s Baby of television? OK, I may exaggerate, but if it’s a taste of Harper regimes to come, we are in the wrong hands to put it gently.
If you are straining to find a silver lining in these trends, it’s this: In the main, the polls point to a Harper minority and a carbon copy of the current parliamentary seat allocation. If that happens, we could be rid of all four leaders before our next trip to the polls. Wouldn’t that be a blessing?
Lying bastards (cont.)
Esteemed Metro gadfly Michael Marshall, running this time for the Greens in Bill Dooks’s Eastern Shore riding, agrees with fellow veridian David Croft. He writes:
I am running and organizing again for the Greens, and I do for them what I did as an N-dipper: tell everybody what I think we’ll actually get for votes, be it 2% or 16%. It didn’t seem to hurt me among the public, other parties, or the media, but the party faithful often protested that we were going to win and should say so.
But when I asked if they were willing to sign for a few thousand dollars in bank loans against the rebate returned to winning candidates, they quickly backed off. Generally, the lazier the supporter, the more they proclaim we’re ‘going to win.’ The real workers know better.
Cape Breton seats in play?
The old saw says they should let Cape Bretoners vote the next day, so we get it right. Until now, there has been a widespread assumption that of the 10 nine Cape Breton seats, only Victoria-The Lakes, held by PC Keith Bain, is in play. Today’s CRA poll gives no reason to challenge that assumption. CRA’s Don Mills says the NDP are merely holding their own on the island, where they currently hold but two seats.
This bears watching. If Cape Bretoners get a sniff of a majority NDP government, things could change quickly.
An NDP majority in the making
The latest poll from Don Mills of Corporate Research Associates shows the NDP at 44 percent. More importantly, it shows them in first place in the rural mainland. 
Some will say the NDP vote is highly concentrated in metro, where they will “waste” votes by winning with unnecessarily huge majorities. Elections are won by seat totals, not vote totals.
Still, 44 percent is well into majority territory. In the last 14 Nova Scotia elections, no party has ever won more than 40 percent of the vote and failed to win a majority. John Hamm won a majority in 1999 with 39% of the vote.
The only partial exception is the 1960 election, when the Liberals won 46% of the vote and exactly half the seats in the legislature. However, one riding was controverted, and another ailing member failed to take his seat, so the Liberals ruled unimpeded until the 1974 election. In any case, the NDP was a small regional rump in Cape Breton at that time, and its vote was highly efficient in winning two seats.
In contrarian‘s view, polls taken between elections mean little, because the public isn’t thinking about casting ballots. Once the writ is dropped, voters turn their mind to the question, and that’s when polls become meaningful. Some dramatic bombshell could still change things, but the strong trend in the NDP’s direction since the election was called shows that voters have finally decided to give Dexter’s New Democrats a chance to govern, for better or for worse (for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, etc., etc.)
Throwing the rascals out?
If you believe governments get defeated, as opposed to opposition parties getting elected, then the satisfied/dissatisfied question in today’s CRA poll poses an ominous portent for Rodney MacDonald.
Satisfaction with MacDonald’s government fell from 54% in February to 45% over the weekend. Rodney’s personal popularity as leader also fell to third place at 20%, behind Dexter at 30% and McNeil at 24%.
CRA was lamentably thin on details. The news release lists the leading party in each region, (Metro: NDP 44%; Rural Mainland: PC 35%; Cape Breton: Liberal 39%), but the tables give no regional breakdown. In any case, the sample size, 627, was small, and if the regions each had one-third of that total, the sampling error would be nearly 7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Regional breakdowns are important in Nova Scotia, because party strength varies so much from one place to another. In our first-past-the-post system, a minority party can increase the efficiency of its vote by concentrating its strength in one region. The Bloc Quebecois, running only in Quebec, gathered 1.4 million votes and 49 seats. The relatively dispersed Green Party attracted 940,000 votes and no seats.
There may not be much polling in this election. The death of the Daily News relieves the struggling Herald of any competitive pressure to produce polls. With ATV and CBC likewise crying poor-mouth, who’s going pay for more polls? Gosh, maybe we’ll have to talk about… issues!
Poll: NDP: 37, Lib 30, PC 28
Don Mills of Corporate Research Associates has released his latest poll, one of the few that will be taken during this campaign. It shows the NDP inching up toward, but not yet reaching, majority territory. The Liberals are also gaining, while the PCs are slipping behind.
Read the CRA news release or download the detailed tables.
