Wisdom of the Crowds

Sadly, the UBC Election Stock market won't be running this election (though, given the amount of money I lost on it last time, I guess that's actually a good thing). If you'll recall, you could buy Liberal popular vote shares if you thought they were due for a bounce in the polls. Or you could buy Conservative majority shares if you thought we were heading in that direction. Like a real stock market, it moved up and down based on demand - and since real money was on the line, it gave us a good idea of where traders expected the public to be on Election Day...unlike polls and seat projections which only tell you where the public is now.

It's a neat concept and, like most event stock markets, it worked well. It's amazing how accurate the wisdom of the crowds can be sometimes.

With this in mind, I'll be tallying up the crowd consensus from my Election Pool in the coming days.

With 50 entries, it certainly isn't a huge sample. And, obviously enough, the readers of this blog are not representative of the Canadian population. But I suspect those who took the time to answer 20 questions on polling companies, ads, and individual ridings have a good sense of what's going on politically. While some will no doubt claim this sample skews Liberal, I have a hard time buying that after looking at the entries - after all, only 4 of you are predicting a Liberal victory.

So, what do the masses expect to change this election? Not a heck of a lot. Here are the average seat projections:

CPC 140 seats
Lib 85 seats
Bloc 51 seats
NDP 32 seats

So the consensus seems to be the Tories and NDP will drop a few seats, with the Liberals making modest gains. Exciting stuff, eh? There is a bit of a range though - 29% of you expect a Tory majority, and 8% are predicting a Liberal victory.

As for Miss May, the center of attention today, just one-in-five (21%) expect her to defeat Gary Lunn in Saanich-Gulf Islands. Predictions on the number of independent candidates elected ranged from 1 to 3 (Arthur, Guergis, and Ford seem to be the likeliest), with the mean at 0.9.

Regionally, the masses are predicting 1.7 seats of Harper in Newfoundland and are split on whether or not over half the Liberal seats won will come from Ontario (63% think they will).