07 March 2008

The quarterly advertising poll

PC support

Bond Papers has raised questions before about CRA's quarterly omnibus polls.

At the time of writing, there's no link to the official release.

The graph at left is a reminder of the gap between the actual vote result last fall and CRA poll results.

The blue line is the CRA PC support for "decided" voters". 

The red line is the CRA result as a percent of all respondents.

The orange line is the CRA category for "undecided", "no answer", and "will not vote."

The election results are represented by dots.  The brownish one is the PC popular, that is the share of people who actually voted.  The blue triangle is the share of all eligible voters and the green circle is the actual percentage of eligible voters who didn't vote.

Take a hard look at the image.

Get a ruler if you have to and measure the gaps.

They're big. The gap between CRA's Tory vote, as a share of all respondents, matched to its correct October comparison - the actual vote as a percentage of all voters - and you'll find a different of 20 percentage points.

CRA consistently inflates the level of Tory support in the province and, while the figures aren't shown here, they consistent deflate the support for the other two political parties.  It doesn't matter why; the most likely reason is the way CRA conducts the poll.  The fact that the numbers are off by a wide margin is undeniable.

-srbp-

 

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