{"id":2926,"date":"2011-03-30T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-30T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=2926"},"modified":"2012-05-30T09:39:03","modified_gmt":"2012-05-30T13:39:03","slug":"wisdom-of-the-crowds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=2926","title":{"rendered":"Wisdom of the Crowds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sadly, the UBC Election Stock market won’t be running this election (though, given the amount of money I lost on it last time, I guess that’s actually a good <\/em>thing). If you’ll recall, you could buy Liberal popular vote shares if you thought they were due for a bounce in the polls. Or you could buy Conservative majority shares if you thought we were heading in that direction. Like a real stock market, it moved up and down based on demand – and since real money was on the line, it gave us a good idea of where traders expected the public to be on Election Day<\/em>…unlike polls and seat projections which only tell you where the public is now<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It’s a neat concept and, like most event stock markets, it worked well. It’s amazing how accurate the wisdom of the crowds can be sometimes.<\/p>\n

With this in mind, I’ll be tallying up the crowd consensus from my Election Pool<\/a> in the coming days. <\/p>\n

With 50 entries, it certainly isn’t a huge sample. And, obviously enough, the readers of this blog are not representative of the Canadian population. But I suspect those who took the time to answer 20 questions on polling companies, ads, and individual ridings have a good sense of what’s going on politically. While some will no doubt claim this sample skews Liberal, I have a hard time buying that after looking at the entries – after all, only 4 of you are predicting a Liberal victory.<\/p>\n

So, what do the masses expect to change this election? Not a heck of a lot. Here are the average seat projections:<\/p>\n

CPC<\/strong> 140 seats
Lib<\/strong> 85 seats
Bloc<\/strong> 51 seats
NDP<\/strong> 32 seats<\/p>\n

So the consensus seems to be the Tories and NDP will drop a few seats, with the Liberals making modest gains. Exciting stuff, eh? There is a bit of a range though – 29% of you expect a Tory majority, and 8% are predicting a Liberal victory.<\/p>\n

As for Miss May, the center of attention<\/a> today, just one-in-five (21%) expect her to defeat Gary Lunn in Saanich-Gulf Islands<\/a>. Predictions on the number of independent candidates elected ranged from 1 to 3 (Arthur, Guergis, and Ford<\/a> seem to be the likeliest), with the mean at 0.9.<\/p>\n

Regionally, the masses are predicting 1.7 seats of Harper in Newfoundland and are split on whether or not over half the Liberal seats won will come from Ontario (63% think they will).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sadly, the UBC Election Stock market won’t be running this election (though, given the amount of money I lost on it last time, I guess that’s actually a good thing). If you’ll recall, you could buy Liberal popular vote shares if you thought they were due for a bounce in the polls. Or you could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1019,978,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2011-federal-election","category-calgary-grit-contests-and-polls","category-federal-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2926"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3660,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions\/3660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}