We are now almost exactly half-way through the 2021 election so what can we say about the first half?
My first thought is social media distorts reality to the extreme. The political side of it has been dominated by polls saying that the Liberals are in trouble while the Conservatives are on the rise. This of course is based off of two pollsters who release their results on social media on a daily basis, which then takes off with social media examining and analyzing every half point change with all of the effort and passion of Stephen Hawking trying to figure out the universe. This behaviour is being enthusiastically copied by the MSM who spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the "horse race" while giving the announcements by the party leaders short shrift.
The thing is the pollsters are actually all but admitting that their polls do not reflect reality. They are saying they are crap. As well, several pollsters have stated that they are not reaching all of their polling populations for a whole host of reasons, which adds further doubts to their polls. Finally most are at least hinting that people are not yet engaged in the election and they will not be for a few more days
However, the one piece of useful information I saw yesterday was from the Abacus and Leger polls. Hidden in all of the data they presented were estimates that indicated, on average, more than 40% of respondents to their surveys believe that the Liberals are going to win the election while only around one-quarter believe the Conservatives will win. So, after two solid weeks of social media and the MSM saying that the Conservatives could win this election it would appear that a very large chunk of Canadians have not received that message. I would add my usual caution about public polls but these estimates combined with the statements of the pollsters described above would seem to indicate that there is some validity in the assertion of the low level of engagement by Canadians.
Social media, the MSM and the political parties and their partisans are certainly engaged but the rest of the country? They are squeezing every last bit of pleasure they can out of the summer.
So how about the parties?
The Liberals have been running the campaign they wanted to run. This slow roll-out of their policies, culminating in the release of their full platform the day before the TVA debate was planned. The fact that they did not stray from that plan would seem to indicate that they believe they can meet their objective on September 20, despite what social media has been saying for the last two weeks. They will switch gears after today and we will see just what they are made of between now and e-day.
The Conservatives have also been running the campaign they wanted to run. Their whole strategy is to present themselves as non-threatening. Really, yesterday when the Liberals were announcing more funding and program ideas to address mental health the Conservatives were talking about puppies. Their thinking must be to say: "Hey, yes, we are going to cancel cheap daycare, allow for the privatization of health care, allow industries to continue to produce GHGs at a terrible rate and allow a whole bunch of slack jawed anti-vaxxers take us back into restrictions and lockdowns but hey we love puppies." I like puppies as much as the next guy, I absolutely love my dog, but this to the Conservatives was a serious policy announcement? This is the kind of strategy you run when you are trying to prevent your party from being crushed on election day.
The NDP is running a typical NDP campaign. Accuse the Liberals of not being progressive enough and hope that they can win enough seats to stay relevant. Their preferred outcome is a minority government where they are the kingmakers and yes they would support the Conservatives in a minority government if it came to that. Unfortunately for them this election has become a two-way contest, so e-day could be rather disappointing when voters decide on which of the two big parties they want to govern the country.
So now we enter the second half of the election campaign. We will have three debates and the parties will focus their messaging and their campaigns. The Liberals have given themselves alot of ammo with which to convince Canadians they deserve another mandate and they may be helped by anti-vaxx protesters. As well, the Conservatives have come down on the wrong side of at least a half a dozen issues so I am certain the Liberals will begin to point that out more and more.
Erin O'Toole is already repeating himself on the campaign trail because his platform is so thin. They are pointing to some of their most insignificant policy ideas just to have something to say on a daily basis (We love puppies!). They have been blessed with a Liberal campaign that has been busy setting up their second half so they have not yet been seriously challenged. That is about to change and you have to wonder how they will react. If they are true to form they will go personal.
I have stated for quite sometime that the ballot question is whether Canadians want a change in government or not? I still do not believe so. They may not be totally enamoured with the Trudeau government but most will also realize that the reason why we seem to be seeing the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel is because of what the Liberals have been doing for the last 18 months. As well, many will just not want to change the government after all of the upheaval we have been going through for the last year and a half. There is still half a campaign to go but at the end of it I still expect a Liberal government, with a very high probability of it being a majority government.
4 comments:
The worst thing to have happened to political coverage are those stupid aggregator models that extrapolate the horse race onto seats. They take the polls at face value even when they have an obvious bias and/or their results make no sense. The two IVR polls currently have B.C. with the Liberals registering 0 seats. Which is ridiculous on its face, yet gets entered into the model as a valid data point. If you took out those two extreme pollsters the Liberals would be at 2019 levels right now.
The problem is it creates an echo chamber narrative in the media and a bandwagoning effect. Then again, maybe those 40% or so unconvinced of a Conservative win are the same ones who are "tuned out until after Labour Day"? I have no idea. I just want to get the debates over with in hopes Trudeau does well and leaves all the garbage pundits and pollsters with egg on their face.
O'Toole and his regressive party are enough of a target, particularly so with the Liberals' platform planks on guns and abortion. The sticky wicket in the gears is Singh, who in his delusions of grandeur keeps aiming at the wrong enemy.
I hate this election.
You are absolutely right Jackie. If you remove the three rolling polls from the equation the Liberals gain seats in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, and the Eastern Provinces. They gain enough seats to put them well into majority territory. It is a tossup of whether they lose seats in Ontario. It looks like it could go either way but in the end it would probably just wind up very similar to the results from 2019. In short, Ontario might not have the impact many currently believe it will in the end.
The three rolling polls are really skewing the polling averages and seat aggregators in the other direction.
I know that people can legitimately question removing them from the equation but there is still the concept of outliers in statistics and the usual way of dealing with outliers is to remove them.
You are also right about the echo chamber. That is the best description of social media out there. The problem with echo chambers is they rarely impact anything outside of that chamber.
The Parties are outside of that echo chamber which is why none of them are reacting as you would expect if the rolling polls were actually representing reality.
Contrary to popular belief the debates usually do not have much of an impact because no one really watches them. They give the illusion of being important because they take place close enough to e-day for people to draw a correlation between them and the final result. However, as they say, correlation does not equal causation.
If Canadians do not want to change governments they will not do so regardless of the debates. If they do they will.
I hate all elections because they have degenerated into what we have been seeing for the last two and a half weeks. They are just annoying. When this one started I said that I should just ignore it. I know how I am going to vote so there is no point paying attention. I will contribute money to both the national and local Liberal campaign, vote during the advanced polls and glance at what is happening the day before so I am not surprised on e-day. Unfortunately, elections are the flame and I am the moth. I just cannot seem to stay away from them. Maybe the bullshit be have seen from this one will finally convince me to stay away from the next one, although I am not holding my breath on that score.
Those IVR daily robopolls are such bullshit that I honestly will be happy if this election turns out like BC 2013 where everyone got it wrong. There is absolutely no way possible that the Cons are running up Alberta numbers in Atlantic and BC.
IVR is a legitimate method of collecting surveys.
However, like all survey methodologies it has its drawbacks. One of them is indeed people hanging up on it because the robot voice reminds people of those robocalls stating that we might have broken the law so we need to contact the tax department right away and give them our financial information. Then there is the issues with over and under sampling for rolling polls. I will say again that both IVR polling companies are new to the rolling poll business. The other company doing rolling polls has been doing them since the 2004 election and it has estimates that are much different. That very same company shows the Liberals with a double digit lead in the Greater Toronto Area and that is why Mr. Scrimshaw says the Conservatives cannot win. If the Conservative increase in Ontario is in areas were the Conservatives are already strong, with a few seats on the fringe of those areas being competitive, then that would be like the Conservatives winning Alberta with 65% of the vote. More votes but not more seats.
I note that both of the IVR polls are moving away from the "Liberals are losing Ontario story" but they are still saying that the Conservatives are way up in BC and the Maritimes. Like you I find such claims dubious. Mind you for the Maritimes it should be noted that they only poll about 80 people per night so you can have huge swings in polling there. As well, they only poll about 120 per night in BC so there is a great deal of potential for big swings there.
I also notice that the Conservatives are polling more than 15 points off of their 2019 vote count in Alberta and they are off a few points in the other Prairie Provinces. As it stands now they would lose seats in all three provinces and for every seat they lose there they have to make them up somewhere else.
I believe that all of this will change during the next couple of weeks. It will not be a quick change though and it will have stops and starts but by e-day we will probably see the pollsters predicting a Liberal minority and then, like 2015, when the Liberals win more than 170 seats none of the pollsters or pundits will exhibit a bit of surprise.
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