Now that the Oct. 14 federal election is in the rearview mirror, we are starting to get a bit better idea of how the deal actually went down. One part of the picture emerged this morning in the
Globe story on how Liberal leader Stephane Dion finally learned he was going to lose the election. One thing successful political leaders do is make sure they are getting honest, timely information on what is really happening so that they can respond appropriately and seize opportunities. Weak leaders are usually the last to understand what is happening, a fact the voters always take note of. Guess which group Dion is in?
Another interesting thread involves the polling which went on throughout the campaign. Turns out that the pollsters were pretty close to nailing the final party votes and seat totals but they missed a small but significant shift toward the Conservatives on the Thanksgiving weekend, after they had folded their data gathering operations. The two firms that polled on the holiday Monday got the results right. The lesson there would be to keep polling up to the end of the campaign period, if you want to give people an accurate picture of what is happening. More interestingly, two pollsters told the
Hill Times that the introduction of rolling daily polls in this campaign helped alleviate the possibility of polling errors. The dailies dampened the impact of the old stand-alone blockbuster polls the media used to specialize in during campaign, some of which were wrong, or out of date upon publication. Apparently the antidote to bad polling is more polling, more often. The fact the polling didn't come under attack from voters this time would seem to lend credence to that conclusion. Still, the pollsters gave the news media a low grade of C+ for its reporting on the polls. A bit more attention to what the polls were actually saying day to day would have yielded a much richer story than the press ended up telling. It was ever thus.
Labels: canada, elections, news media, polling
