Posted by Another election, another completely failed prediction by pollsters and the media, another mea culpa and navel gazing exercise trying to explain what they forgot to take into account this time.
It may have started with Brexit when, against all odds and polls, the U.K. voted by a thin majority in favour of leaving the European Union. Why the majority of Brexit polls were wrong, is how this post-mortem by CNBC put it. “Leading up to voting day, the vast majority of polls predicted the remain side would prevail, however the final results gave the leave side a victory margin of more than one million votes… The Remain campaign was heavily dependent on support among younger voters and they simply didn’t show up…” Aside from Brexit, British pollsters and the media have not been very good at predicting voting in general as this headline from the Independent sadly tries to justify, A year ago, the opinion polls fooled us – but it doesn’t mean we can’t trust them again. “In 2015 they suggested a hung parliament and we got a Conservative majority – the opposite of 2017… In short, the polls got it wrong in 2017 because they got it wrong in 2015. The pollsters over-corrected and got it wrong in the opposite direction. The main cause of the error in 2015, Prof Sturgis found, was that samples had become unrepresentative. The pollsters tried to fix the problem, and, after the 2017 election, we found that they had succeeded. If they had left it at that, they would have got the result roughly right.” Wow, that’s an amazing condemnation of the entirely polling process itself poorly dressed up as an attempt to justify their continued failure.
Of course, it’s not just the British that have been dismally bad at polling and election predictions. The biggest failure in recent history was in the United States with the “surprise” election of President Donald Trump. This is what Business Insider had to say in an article titled, A group of major pollsters just released an autopsy report to explain why the polls were such a disaster in 2016.
A conglomerate of top pollsters released an autopsy report last week on polling in the 2016 election — specifically, what went wildly wrong in overwhelming predictions of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
The analysis, released Thursday by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, found that the biggest culprit was state-level polling underestimating the level of Trump’s support, most importantly in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
There were a number of reasons for the discrepancy, the study concluded.
The big three were a substantive change in vote preference during the campaign’s final days, a failure to properly adjust for an overrepresentation of college graduates, and many Trump voters failing to reveal their preferences until after the election. The last point could have also been the result of late-deciding Trump voters, the report said.
In the Great White North, we are hardly better. This is what Maclean’s (Canada’s left-leaning equivalent of Time magazine) had to say one day before the Ontario election in June, “The Maclean’s-Pollara Ontario election poll shows Doug Ford and Andrea Horwath in photo finish.” “They’re all tied up, 38-38-17. That’s how the major Ontario political parties stack up on the day before the final vote in a historic provincial election, according to the final instalment of a Pollara Strategic Insights tracking poll for Maclean’s.” While the survey was talking about popular vote, the final seat tally came out as 76-40-7 for the Conservatives, NDP and Liberals respectively – a solid majority and a crushing defeat for the Liberals who actually did so poorly they lost official party status in Ontario.
The news for pollsters doesn’t get better. A few weeks ago, Quebec went to the polls in an election that ended over half-a-century duopoly of power between the Parti-Quebecois and Liberals.
But it was still a close race. The CBC’s Quebec Poll Tracker, an aggregation of all publicly available polls, put the CAQ at just under 33 per cent, and the Liberals at just over 29 per cent. The widest gap between the CAQ and the Liberals in any poll was five points, but most had it at two or three points.
When all the votes were counted, however, the CAQ received just over 37 per cent of ballots cast. The Liberals took a little under 25 per cent. That represented an error of some nine points between the two leading parties compared to the margin the polls suggested separated them.
That is a large error — the biggest in any provincial or federal election in Canada since 2013 in B.C. That was five years and 14 elections ago, when the New Democrats averaged a lead of about seven points in the polls before losing to the Liberals by a margin of four points.
Results from Quebec left a few pollsters scratching their heads and raised questions regarding the reliability of polls, particularly with the federal election only a year away. Pollsters will have little time and few opportunities to tweak and test their methodologies — but already the reasons for the miss in Quebec are coming into focus.
Liberal supporters staying home and CAQ voters turning out in big numbers explains part of the polling miss. The voting population was less Liberal and more caquiste than the population as a whole. Turnout alone, however, cannot explain the entirety of the errors. The second culprit identified by pollsters relates to the volatility of the electorate — a unique feature of the 2018 campaign.
Well gentle readers, there you have it. The pollsters have been getting it wrong time and time again recently and each time they blame two major things: missing out on who voted (the young didn’t vote, the college educated were over-represented in polling, old white people came out in droves, etc) and a late last minute change or surge in support for the eventual winner. Which is precisely the sort of things that polls are meant to reflect but are doing a woefully bad job in doing so. Unfortunately, the same polls then get mindlessly parroted in the media by reporters who barely can comprehend the statistics used in the polling methodology.
So it is with great happiness that I was confronted by this headline from the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation today, “365 days to go — and Trudeau’s Liberals have the edge on the 2019 election.” At least they had the intelligence to add the byline, “Parties that lead in the polls one year before an election win … most of the time” before going on to wax eloquently that “With these numbers, the Poll Tracker estimates that the Liberals would have a two-in-three chance of winning a majority government and a six-in-seven chance of winning the most seats.” Given how “accurate” these brainiacs at the polling companies and the media have been at calling elections for the past five years; it gives me great confidence and hope that this will be Junior’s last year in power and that his economy destroying SJW agenda hiding behind a facade of smiling selfies will be relegated to the dustbin of history.
While this is my hope, the recent election results in Europe and elsewhere around the world suggests that populism is on the rise (ie, Brexit and President Trump were not just one-off flukes) and liberalism is in full-scale retreat around the world. The provincial elections in Ontario and Quebec in the last few months suggests that Canada is not particularly immune to this global trend. So the liberal media, like this New York Times article from a year ago titled, “Canada’s Secret to Resisting the West’s Populist Wave” have completely lost the plot as they still live in denial in their idealised candy-land complete with fairies and frolicking unicorns dancing on rainbows. Canada and Canadians are not immune to the global populist wave, we are just behind the times. Or as Robin Sherbatsky said in the comedy series How I met your mother, “despite being recorded in the early 1990s, the song and video were influenced by the late 1980s style because the1980s ‘didn’t come to Canada until ’93′”. I mean Doug Ford as premier of Ontario is as Trumpian as you’re going to get while the Coalition Avenir Québec is a nationalistic anti-immigration party that has prompted over-educated elite urban lefties in Montreal to write stupid articles like this one titled, “5 Reasons Why Montreal Should Separate From Quebec Now That The CAQ Is In Power“. Despite what the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation and the pollsters say, I still think that these are the last 365 days for our Trudeau junior as our Prime Minister and I’m counting down each and every one of them.