In my previous post I stated that the MSM in this country would spend much of the election pushing the narrative that the Conservatives are exceeding expectations and that they will be able to find pollsters willing to provide them with the "data" to "prove" it.
Less than 24 hours later we have seen the first instance of that narrative. CTV has reported that the "race has tightened" by quoting a Nanos poll that indicates the Liberals have lost 6 points while the Conservatives picked up 4 points and that there is a general agreement that an election is unnecessary.
Where does one begin?
I guess first of all this was predictable. My only surprise was I believed it would be the PostMedia folks who would start the narrative.
I have no idea what Nic Nanos is doing. I have always found him to be a piss-poor pundit because he often comes up with points of view that are not supported by his own data. However, I have to question his chops on this poll. Just three days before he released this poll he released one that indicated the Liberals were in the high thirty percent range while the Conservatives were in the mid-20s. Is he indicating that public opinion turned so dramatically in that three days for there to be an aggregate 10 point swing? Really? Public opinion does not work that way. The only time I have ever seen public opinion shift that dramatically, in such a short amount of time, was when the Auditor General released the report on the Sponsorship Program that triggered adscam. That report was dramatic and damning. Has anything like that happened in the last three days? No, so the dramatic swing is immediately suspect.
Part of the explanation that we received was this poll coincided with an increase in resistance to an election over the month the poll was taken. That begs the question of why was this not reflected in the poll released three days before this one? You would think that such sentiments would be felt and measured by all Nanos polls. Maybe the polls have different methodologies and I can agree that polls with different methodologies can create differences in the estimates, even when they are conducted by the same company, but a 10 point difference?
As well, let's look at the whole idea that Canadians are so against having an election that it would cause such a huge swing. This is not a true "snap" election. The Liberals began telegraphing it before The House rose for the summer and the media and the Opposition Parties were quite happy to assist them by endlessly speculating on when the election would begin. The conventional wisdom saying it would be sometime in September was set over a month ago. I have stated in this space many times before that political parties have data analysis teams whose job is to "take the pulse" of the electorate. Those data analysts would have been collecting and analyzing data on the attitudes of Canadians with regard to having an election right up until today. If they would have seen what the Nanos poll is saying we would not be going into an election. Incidentally, the Opposition data analysts were saying the same thing to their leadership, which is why they have been pushing the "election is a bad idea" position for the past month. Apparently, their message did not take.
I have been saying for quite some time that the public polls that are published in the media should be ignored. They are next to useless in telling you what is actually happening and if the final polls of the election come anywhere close to the actual final results it is a coincidence. I have stated that the most probable outcome of the election is a Liberal victory, with a strong possibility that they will form a majority government, but we will not know for certain until election night and all of the polls that will be published between now and then will not change that fact.
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