Polls and Pundits

Andrew Coyne, determined to break the Michael Jordan comeback record, has been blogging for the past few weeks and even has his comments section back on.

Good thing, because Darrell Bricker from Ipsos Reid serves up this gem:

AC:

I've become a regular reader of your blog this election. Your commentary is great, plus you get a lot of smart chatter back from your readers.

Just to add my two cents, when you get a confluence of polls (with different methodologies, samples, and questions) all saying the same thing it's no longer a blip. It's a trend. This is real and it's big. That's because what has really turned against Martin this time are the fundamentals - leadership, party best on key policies, momentum, time for a change, trust, etc. For all the polling fans, these are independent variables - they CAUSE the dependent variable (vote) to change. Vote is a trailing indicator, not a leading indicator. The fundamentals started going downhill some time ago, vote is only now catching up.

Now, like everybody else, I remember what happened the last time. But, the big difference then was that the independent variables never got quite as bad for the Grits. This time they're horrible and they're still heading the wrong way. And, for all of the Conservative Nervous Nellies, you now have to learn to play with a lead!

A couple of last points. First, banning polls. What? You don't trust people with the truth? Ban them and we'll get parties leaking false polls, people who can afford to do private polls holding on to the results and using them for personal gain, and people who can't be prosecuted (eg Americans) doing them and leaking them on the Internet. That's better? Instead, we should have lots of polls so that the crappy ones become obvious. Information in a democracy is a good thing.

Second, there's no such thing as the 1 in 20 poll. It's a hypothetical concept. What a true rogue poll is is a poll in which everything was done correctly, and a result outside of the margin of error occurs. Show me a poll that was wrong, and I'll show you a mistake that a pollster made (question wording, sample design, interviewer bias, timing, etc).

Finally, I'm waiting for everybody to start crapping on our seat model again. But, instead of getting into the whys and hows at this stage, just search on my name at the Globe's website and you'll see an article I wrote for the last campaign on seat models. It'll answer all of your questions. And, I don't have much to say beyond that.

Anyway, keep up the good work! I look forward to being a regular reader.

I couldn't find that G & M article Darrell mentions so if anyone knows where it is, please link up to it in the comments section.

Also, Ekos has a very detailed breakdown of their latest poll numbers here. I've has some doubts about Ekos polls in the past and couldn't find their methodology on-line for this poll, but it's still interesting to see the breakdowns and bonus questions on this latest poll. The big sample size allows us to see some interesting regional breakdowns, especially in Quebec. (to be fair, Ekos has the Tories 4 or 5 points higher in Quebec than all the other polls released over the past two days)