I see that there is some new polling data out today, and so I decided to dust off my Election Matrix spreadsheet to do some math. Ladies and gentleman, I am a mathematician; please don't try this at home. It is interesting to note that while the Tories are down 5% from the last election, the NDP and the Liberals are still below 2008, while the Bloc is even. Despite hundreds of hours of dedicated pandering by Soloman and O'Malley, Iggy's party is still behind Stephane Dion's take. They had been ahead in the polls during the peak of the recession, but then they faded until they nose dived completely in September. Even as the Tory numbers have been in slow decline while the CBC has been shoving this down our throats, the Liberal numbers have flat lined, with just a slight upward slope.
The Green Party on the other hand is up almost 6.5%, and would seem to be the only beneficiary from a loss of Tory support. Yet we see election after election that the Greens always poll higher than they perform on Election Day. This means either people who support them are less likely to vote (many of them I suspect don't get out of bed until the late afternoon most days) or that people say Green to telephone pollsters when they don't mean it. We can believe that 650,000 people just dropped out of the Tory tent and defected to the Green Party; or we can just say curb our enthusiasm, have government ministers working hard to earn the money they are making, and let's prepare to impress voters after the Olympics.
When you plug the "extremely damaging" poll results by Ekos today into the 2008 Matrix, I have the new seat count projected at 126 Tory, 87 Liberal, 41 NDP, 52 Bloc, and 2 Independents. Evidently James Ford has a fighting chance in Edmonton. I don't even know who he is. The Ekos guy was correct in saying that the Tories were closer to being out of power than to a majority, by a margin of about 8 seats. But still, if the Liberals were unable to resist exploiting a perceived advantage and called an election, they would certainly pay a price.
Winston Churchill once said "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Kudos to O'Malley and Soloman for getting out in front quickly with their manufactured outrage and exploiting this Facebook tactic for all it's worth. I think some Facebook addicts may take it a little too seriously and got wrapped up in a movement less exhilarating than the chick who wants to name her baby Megatron. Let's wait until the Olympics, when the world is watching and visiting, to revisit the question, aren't we glad that Question Period is not on TV for a couple more weeks?
Then after we host the world, let's see a really strong budget at the start of March, and take it from there. Canada's economic performance in this recovery from recession has been fantastic. I didn't want to spend that much on stimulus, but the Liberals flirted with the Coalition possibility unless we proceeded with a stimulus. Remember the "Coalition if necessary but not necessarily a Coalition"? There will be a price to pay in the future for the stimulus package; thankfully the Conservative government has done a magnificent job distributing the money.
The left tried out a new tactic in conjunction with the CBC with this "Scorched Facebook" strategy which may have seduced a few unsuspecting souls who trusted the suggestion of a friend they had in high school. That's fine. Free will, it is a bitch. I do plan to do more on this lady who promised to name her baby Megatron and the 100,000 people who signed up to support it. Has the child been born? I want the naming of the child to be legally binding. I may file a personal court injunction asking a judge to legally force her to name her baby Megatron if she chickens out and risks ruining the lives of 100,000 people. I guarantee that young Megatron will be the most popular kid in his elementary school.
Dude, it's over. Deal with it. We win!
ReplyDeleteI have a theory as to why polling results seem to be skewed in favour of the left, and although a bit simplistic I think it makes sense :-)
ReplyDeletePolling is typically done two ways, by phone, or man on the street. My view is that the kind of people who vote tory are typically hard working and busy, so will a) blow off the man on the street, and b) either not be at home (i.e. working for a living) or too busy to deal with phone polls. As you move left in the spectrum the ooposite becomes more and more true.
I've seen the same at the voting booth, where Green turn-out is virtually 100%, NDP 90+ and Tory about 70%. If the tories could get the same kind of turn-out as the greens in their identified support they'd probably have a majority.
I know that before they extended early polls, my wife and I often missed voting because work was simply more important.
The other issue I have with these polls is they never seem to publish the phrasing of the question. I expect that's because the question is phrased to elicit a desired poll result.
Will the CBC be able to sustain their support for the anti Harper camps for 2010?
ReplyDeleteWill the CBC continue to lose audience to CTV, for all of December they could not crack top 30 viewed. Other than Hockey and Christmas Specials why turn on CBC?
Just like the FB group, a dark alley, the CBC is a meeting place for haters of the current gov't.
It reminds me how the "Arts" community were exploited by the MSM, opposition parties in a small cut in a controversial arts program.
The entitled get very upset if you deny them of "entitlements".
The Ekos poll is very biased for the left. The same same as Ipsos Reid for the right.
ReplyDeleteNanos seems to be the most unbiased of all the polls. Wasn't it last week that they showed the tories at 39% and the liberals at 30..
I guess those greens will be cleaning the atsmosphere with their new improve environmental cars and planting plants and trees and most of all giving their money to Al Gore, Suzuki, May so they can buy a mansion resort or company of their own.
ReplyDeleteI notice that these green people seem to do more traveling, use more electricity and apparently not one of them are living by a candle light; in a hut made of straw or using sun or moon for light and enegry. Strange.
Since many Canadians and Face Book people have now learned that prorogation is not a new phenomenon invented by Stephen Harper, but was actually used by the Liberals and Jean Chretien who shut parliament down for 80 days, for the express purpose to save his hide, and let Paul Martin have to deal with the Liberal Sponsorship scandal.
ReplyDeleteSo Canadians and Face Book types now realize they have to make a decision. Do they want a Conservative government with the right to prorogue parliament, a legitimate tool of democracy, or do they want a Liberal government with, not only the right to prorogue parliament, but also the right to raid the government's bank accounts for millions of dollars of taxpayer's money, to distribute in brown paper bags to Liberals and their cronies, as they did in the sponsorship scandal? When Canadians consider the alternative to the Harper government, something tells me there won't be thousands of entries in Face Book, for many good reasons, asking for the Liberals to replace the Conservatives.