{"id":5140,"date":"2013-05-15T22:50:24","date_gmt":"2013-05-16T02:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=5140"},"modified":"2013-05-15T22:50:24","modified_gmt":"2013-05-16T02:50:24","slug":"chickening-out-on-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=5140","title":{"rendered":"Chickening Out On Change"},"content":{"rendered":"
\""Well<\/a>
“Well this is awkward”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We’ve been reminded this week that an 8-point lead in the dying days of an election campaign is about as safe<\/a> as a 2-goal lead in the final 90 seconds of a playoff hockey game. Never take anything for granted.<\/p>\n

Despite leading by between 2 to 9 points<\/a> in every poll fielded over the past week, Adrian Dix managed to snatch defeat<\/a> from the jaws of victory. It was a stunning <\/em>result that no one saw coming – even though the exact same thing <\/em>happened just one year ago in Alberta. In that campaign, Allison Redford trailled by 2 to 10 points <\/a>in every poll, but still crushed Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Alliance on election night.<\/p>\n

This has, of course, set off another round of polling post-mortems. I blogged about six possible polling error<\/a> after the Alberta Surprise, and the issues are largely the same in British Columbia. So rather than rehash each point I want to look at the big picture.<\/p>\n

We can quibble about things like question wording and ordering, but the largest problem cuts to the very core of the science of sampling – simply, polls are not truly <\/em>drawn from a random sample of voters. I have no doubt if everyone <\/em>was forced to vote and everyone <\/em>was forced to answer the phone when pollsters came a calling, we’d see results within the margin of error. But that’s simply not the case, even though we pretend it is.<\/p>\n

Indeed, only half of British Columbians bothered to vote<\/a> yesterday. Admitedly, it’s difficult to figure out who is really going to vote in a world where 80% of people intend<\/em> to…but then don’t bother showing up because they get distracted…or tied up a work…or because the weather sucks…or because the weather’s too nice to spend voting. There are ways to minimize this source of error, but it doesn’t appear polling companies made any effort to screen out unlikely voters or to gauge how solid support levels were. If they did, it wasn’t reported in the methodology, which is another problem in and of itself.<\/p>\n

Moreover, there were warning signs the NDP was destined to lose the turnout game. Both Ipsos<\/a> and Angus<\/a> Reid showed the NDP and Liberals neck-and-neck among older voters, with the NDP up by 20-30 points among the under 35 crowd – a group notorious for their loud music, baggy pants, and low voter turnout rates<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The other side of the equation is that, sadly, not everyone is forced to respond to pollsters when the phone rings during Survivor. If you’re willing to spend the money, you can get a respectable <\/em>response rate via traditional phone surveys, but all polls published during the BC campaign used either robocalls or online pannels.<\/p>\n

Both of those methodologies have inherent problems. You often need to make 50 to 100 robo calls to find one sap willing to complete the survey. So we know Adrian Dix is popular with shut-ins, but extrapolating beyond that is risky. Moreover, since robocalls can only ask 5 simple questions before respondents drop off, you rarely have the opportunity to collect enough demographic information to judge how representative the sample is.<\/p>\n

You can get those demographics using online panels, but while a national panel will have hundreds of thousands of Canadians on it, you\u2019re fishing from a much smaller pool when you get down to the provincial level. You can always try to correct for demographic biases via weighting, but this can lead to a whole new set of problems. And it’s almost impossible to correct for attitudinal biases. The bottom line is that if you don’t have a large enough sample from Vancouver Island on your panel, you’re not going to get good data from Vancouver Island. It’ll be the same hundred people answering every survey.<\/p>\n

Still, when different methodologies in different provinces keep missing the mark in the same direction, it feels like there’s something larger at play here. While the Clark and Redford miracles stand out, Jean Charest exceeded public polling numbers in 2012<\/a>, as did Stephen Harper in 2011<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In all cases, voters had the opportunity to turf long-time and largely unpopular governments – then chickened out on change at the last minute. If an increasingly disengaged electorate truly is making up its mind more and more in the dying days (or hours) of the campaign, then a horse race poll is never going to predict the outcome spot on. <\/p>\n

But maybe that’s not the end of the world. After all, superficial media polls are not designed to provide anything deeper than cheap entertainment. And where’s the fun in cheap entertainment, if the chance for a last-minute comeback doesn’t exist?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve been reminded this week that an 8-point lead in the dying days of an election campaign is about as safe as a 2-goal lead in the final 90 seconds of a playoff hockey game. Never take anything for granted. Despite leading by between 2 to 9 points in every poll fielded over the past […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[824,11],"tags":[1361,1047,980,1043,1366],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140"}],"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=5140"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5153,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140\/revisions\/5153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}