The not-so-rare leap: @abacusdata June 2015 #nlpoli

Two different polls from two different pollsters using two different polling methods have shown basically the same thing:  the New Democrats and Conservatives are duking it out for second place, both of whom remain well behind the Liberals who hold a massive lead in provincial politics.

Corporate Research Associates (May) showed the Conservatives still slightly ahead of the New Democrats.  Abacus Data’s most recent poll for VOCM shows the New Democrats slightly ahead.

Abacus’  David Coletto described the NDP  jump as “rare”, but that’s not really the case.

Q2 2015 Poll Speculation #nlpoli

Corporate Research Associates boss Don Mills has done a good job of teasing the results of his latest poll, due Monday.

"Significant" change in voter intentions, Mills tweeted on Friday and repeatedly over the weekend.

It's all fed a great deal of speculation.  Someone fed the self-styled Hydroqueen internal Liberal polling numbers and she has blogged them and tweeted about them repeatedly. Your humble e-scribbler jumped into another conversation based on the foggy early-morning memory and since that memory was so horribly wrong,  here's a review of the recent poll numbers based on more than memory.

So are those Hydroqueen numbers the sort of results CRA will release?

About how the predictions of further Liberal decline or of a Conservative rise?

Will CRA show any of that?

Probably not.

The Abacus Insight #nlpoli

[Updated:  1715 hrs]

By lunch time today, you’ll have Corporate Research Associate’s latest quarterly omnibus poll.  Odds are the overall numbers on party choice for provincial politics will be in line with all the other polls we’ve seen over the last while.

What sets Abacus Data’s poll released on Tuesday is that Abacus asked a bunch of questions that give much greater insight into local public opinion than what you’ve seen from the other opinion research firms.

Before we get to that stuff, let’s look at the party choice numbers.

A cunning plan it ain’t #nlpoli

The whole “Paul-Davis-Decisive-Leader” thing doesn’t seem to be working for the provincial Conservatives.

The latest NTV/MQO poll puts the Liberals at 42, the Conservatives at 20 and the NDP at seven,  with 30% undecided.

In October 2014,  it was Liberals 37,  Conservatives 16,  NDP six, and undecided at 40.

In October 2013,  the Liberals were at 35, the Conservatives at 20, the NDP at 12, and the undecided at 32.

You can see the trend there of Liberal growth – up seven points -  while the Conservatives hover around 20.  The undecided is down.  Most of them won’t vote anyway.  And the New Democrats have dropped from 12 to seven.

Stragedy and Polls: Chop House version #nlpoli

Public opinion polls are a really useful thing in politics.

The Liberals did a poll the weekend before the Liberals and Conservatives voted to slash public representation in the legislature.  They bought into the scheme in largest part because it looked hugely popular.

The problem with the poll results is that they didn’t tell the Liberals anything useful. You can see the same fundamental problem in the poll commissioned by NTV from MQO.

Decisive Moments in Politics #nlpoli

The NDP are down five points,  the Liberals are up two and the Conservatives are up three, according to the latest Corporate Research Associates poll.

Voters are abandoning the New Democrats who are down by one third from 15 points to 10.  The Liberals and the Conservatives picked up those disaffected former New Democrats, with the Conservatives actually doing better than the Liberals.

Small problem:  that’s not what happened.

What’ve you actually got here is one of the finest possible examples of how the way CRA presents its own numbers can mislead people who want to figure out what is happening with public opinion.

The October 2014 NTV/MQO Poll Numbers #nlpoli

NTV commissioned NTV to poll opinion about the provincial Conservatives a month after Paul Davis took over as Premier.

The party choice numbers are simple enough:  Liberals at 37,  Conservatives at 16,  the NDP at just six percent, and undecided at 40.

Leadership numbers Put Dwight Ball of the Liberals slightly ahead of Paul Davis (31 to 27) with Lorraine at 10 and undecided at 33.

The Conservatives who have been clinging to the belief that “satisfaction” with government is the great hope will be dashed to find the most recent “sat” number is 48%, down from 60% just a short while ago for MQO.

So what does it mean?

The Stark Numbers #nlpoli

Anyone who wants to get insight into the political landscape in Newfoundland and Labrador need look no further than the Abacus poll commissioned by VOCM, the first bit of which was released on Thursday.

Provincial Conservatives may be running around consoling themselves with all sorts of notions but the reality of their position is starkly revealed by Abacus.  Don’t look at the party choice numbers.  Although that’s bad enough news for Conservatives and New Democrats,  that’s the simple stuff.  Look instead at all the data below that.

Grits gain from Cons and Dippers #nlpoli

Premier Kathy Dunderdale doesn’t govern by polls.

That’s what she told reporters – yet again – as they asked her about yet another poll that showed the provincial Conservatives aren’t doing so well with eligible voters.

Then Kathy explained to reporters that the polls told her that she and her colleagues must do a better job of communicating with the people of the province.  Oh yes, and she’d happily “take” the improvement in the satisfaction with her administration.

Dunderdale wasn’t the only one having some problems with the results of the Corporate Research Associates November poll numbers.  New Democratic Party leader Lorraine Michael blamed her party’s dramatic drop on the two guys who left her caucus.  Never mind that the Dipper problems showed up in the polls well before this past quarter.

Let’s dig into this latest set of polling numbers though and see if we can help Kathy and Lorraine figure out what the polls results mean.

CRA, Abacus, and the 2013 Nova Scotia General Election #nlpoli #nspoli

In the recent Nova Scotia General election, Corporate Research Associates and the Halifax Chronicle Herald teamed up to provide readers with a daily tracking poll.

CRA was quick off the mark after the election to issue a news release defending its own polling, complete with the screaming headline that claimed CRA polls had “nailed It”.

A closer looks at polling during the lection and election results tells a different story.

Libs up. Tories and Dippers steady. #nlpoli

By now you have all heard about the latest CRA August quarterly marketing poll.

Fascinating stuff.

Supposedly the Liberals grew at the expense of the New Democrats.  You’d believe that too, unless you looked at CRA party choice numbers without the “decideds-only” skew.  For your amusement, here is a convenient chart showing the numbers as SRBP has unscrewed them

The Blue Slide #nlpoli

Just flip over to labradore for a look at his latest pretty chart.  It shows the compilation of poll results from various sources going back to early 2010 for the Conservatives, the New Democrats, and the Liberals in the province.

On average, labradore tells us,  the Conservatives have dropped five percentage points each quarter since early 2011. 

Note the corresponding changes for the other two parties.

-srbp-

More Hole Spotting #nlpoli

After the shock that evidently settled into the local Tories, the next most obvious thing about Thursday was the complete absence of any official provincial Tory anywhere saying anything about anything.  The usual clan of Tory Twitter Spam Spitters – Sandy Collins, Steve Kent, Vaughan Granter, and Paul lane  - were nowhere to be seen.

Normally these guys are everywhere spewing whatever bullshit talking point they have to spew.

Thursday?

Crickets.

or was it knobby knees knocking?

Hole-spotting: the Environics Poll Results #nlpoli

By now you have likely heard it all.

In one corner are the raft of people trying to dismiss the Environics poll as an outlier, an aberration, the logical result of a tough political month. 

Nothing to sweat.

Real Chip Diller kinda stuff.

In the other corner, there are the New Democrats who are so effercited they are like the dog who caught the car.

Well, here’s another take for you.

Poll Reporting #nlpoli

David Cochrane's report on the latest CRA poll is the tidiest one you will find.  He puts the whole thing in a context that anyone can understand even if some of the Tory twitterati will be apoplectic by the brute force logic of the poll and the trending.

Check out the Telegram story by James McLeod, which includes some commentary by a local political scientist.  

-srbp-

More on the polling controversy #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Susan Delacourt, from The Star, December 30:

Canada’s polling industry could be in for a shakeup in 2012, after some major knocks to its reputation in 2011.

Regular readers will recall the controversy from the federal election and from the fall provincial election from the series on polling and politics.

The Delacourt article mentions concerns voiced by pollsters themselves,  including comments by Ipsos chief executive Darrell Bricker.  He complained about the polling firms themselves and the media and how they report polls.

Delacourt also has some observations by Nik Nanos:

The MRIA [the industry association in Canada] does have a code of conduct and does audit polling firms to see whether they meet its “gold-seal” standard, says Nanos. But he’d like to see MRIA being more active in investigating members, and when it finds problems, Nanos believes the association should be publishing details of the polling transgressions, either on the website or through periodic bulletins.

The SRBP series included the MRIA standards. One of the tidbits that didn’t make it into the series was the standards contained in an FAQ produced by Newspapers Canada in 2008.  The broadcast media don’t have any industry standards at all as best as your humble e-scribbler could find, let alone anything close to these standards for newspapers. 

When I publish an opinion poll, what do I have to include?

If you publish a "real" opinion poll that is - not an unofficial "streeter" - you are required to include certain information if you are the first person to release the information or if you publish it within 24 hours of its first release.

You must include:

• the name of the sponsor of the poll
• the name of the organization who conducted the poll
• the date on which or the period during which the poll was conducted
• the population from which the sample of survey respondents was drawn
• the number of people contacted to participate
• the margin of error, if applicable

As newspapers, you must also include:

• the wording of the survey question
• instructions on how to obtain a written report of the survey results.

If I sponsor an opinion poll, are there any additional requirements?

If you sponsor a public opinion survey, you must, after the release of the survey, provide, on request, a written report that contains the following information:'

• the name and address of the sponsor of the survey
• the name and address of the person or organization that conducted the survey
• the date on which or the period during which the survey was conducted
• Information about the method used to collect the data from which the survey results were derived, including:
• the sampling method
• the population from which the sample was drawn
• the size of the sample
• the number of people asked to participate in the survey and the numbers and percentages of them who did not participate in the survey
• the number of people who refused to participate in the survey and were ineligible to participate in the survey
• the dates and time of day of the interviews
• the method used to recalculate data to take into account the results of participants who expressed no opinion, and any weighting factors or normalization procedures used in deriving the results of the survey
• the wording of the survey questions and the margin of error

A sponsor may charge up to $0.25 per page for a copy of the report.

That’s a pretty comprehensive list of information.  Following this standard would go a long way to correcting many of the problems with media reports of polling, including their own polls.

Too bad newspapers don’t follow the standards at all.

- srbp -

Margin of error defined #nlpoli

Corporate Research Associates November 2011 omnibus:

If a provincial election were held today in Newfoundland and Labrador, for which party would you vote?

Progressive Conservative Party  60%

CRA August 2011 omnibus:

If a provincial election were held today in Newfoundland and Labrador, for which party would you vote?

Progressive Conservative Party 54%

Provincial General Election, October 2011:

Progressive Conservative Party:  32%

- srbp -

The Insiders on Polls during Elections #nlpoli

Just when you thought it was safe to stick your head up now that the poll-talk was gone, along comes three party insiders talking to Peter Mansbridge about polls.

Take the time to watch this video. The front segment on polls is short. You will learn a lot about how political strategists use their own polls to drive campaign decision-making.

And you’ll also hear a pretty frank and largely dismissive discussion about the polls you read in the media.  Most of that discussion will sound very familiar to you. 

The simple answer as to why the public polls are so spectacularly wrong is, as David Herle notes, that the public polls don’t look at voters.  They are actually looking at the population as a whole and with turn-outs dropping, those polls just don’t do a very good job at picking up on opinion in a progressively smaller bit of the electorate.

People lie to pollsters.  What a shock.  People lied to pollsters regularly and quite openly in the polls in this province during the recent general election. 

The pollsters won’t talk about that or their abysmal accuracy because the polls they release are marketing tools.  The media won’t talk about the wildly inaccurate polls because they are marketing tools for them as well.

Kathleen Monk adds a nice bit of colour on how the NDP used polling to determine the emphasis they placed on Jack during the last campaign compared to anything else.

And Jaime Watt adds the fine touch of noting that party people use a bunch of different information – he calls them data points – to figure out what is happening with the campaign.  Polling is one thing.  Canvassing is another and cash flow from donations is yet another of several points.

That last one will tell you why the spreadsheeters like threehundredeight.com go off in the trees.  Not only are they relying on inherently faulty data – those inaccurate public polls – but they rely on basically one type of data to try and forecast how seats were going.

Just to give you a sense of how inadequate that approach can be, realise that your humble e-scribbler chewed over with a colleague used a variation on the poll analysis approach. It turned up some curious things as the polls flowed in the last provincial election.  As the NDP numbers grew and the Tories dropped,  a bunch of seats showed as coming into play.

St. John’s Centre and East would look like they were swinging.

But so too did Virginia Waters.

And Bellevue.

And the Isles of Notre Dame.

The only way you’d cross those off the list of seats that might actually swing is by pulling in other sources of information.  The Straits never showed up on the chart and, frankly, without any signs of anything from that one seat, no one likely saw the change to the NDP coming.

For what it’s worth, your humble e–scribbler’s sister dazzled some of her townie Tory friends by naming seats in Sin Jawns that definitely flipped to the NDP. She never told them where she got the information but it came from an analysis of the polls and other tidbits.

You work with what you’ve got, even if it some of it is inaccurate, but with enough data points you can still build a pretty reliable picture of what’s going on.

The townies never saw  the changes coming largely because the media never reported any of the battle.  But after the votes were counted, her friends figured she was some sort of magician or witch.  A little information can make a lot of difference.

- srbp -

 

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Environics releases second indy poll of campaign #nlpoli #nlvotes

The second independent poll of the provincial campaign – this time by Environics for the Canadian Press  -  turns up some interesting numbers.

You’ll find them below, in a table with the other recent polls results, all put on the same basis as a percentage of total responses.

Two things to notice from Environics compared to either MQO, CRA or Telelink:

First, Environics tells you how they conducted the survey and warned about extrapolating these numbers to the population.

“The non-random nature of online polling makes it impossible to determine the statistical accuracy of how the poll reflects the opinions of the general population.”

Second, they present their figures with all the relevant responses included.  Removing one of the valid response categories – the undecideds – distorts the poll results in a way that can be highly misleading. 

In the past, CRA polls have reported an increase in Conservative support when their poll actually showed a decrease.

In the table below, SRBP recalculated the numbers for MQO and CRA to show percentages of all reported responses, including undecideds.

	CRA	MQO	MQO	NTV	ENV
	Aug	S 20	S 30	Oct 3	Oct 5
PCP	40	42	44	35	38
LIB	16	16	11	08	09
NDP	18	23	27	15	22
UND	26	20	18	42	30
MoE	4.9	4.9	4.5	4.3	-

The Big Story isn’t in these polls

While lots of people will focus on the decline in the Liberal polling numbers and the apparent climb of the NDP during the election, the more dramatic drop has been in the Conservative numbers since early 2010.

That orange line is the share of eligible votes the Tories got in the 2007 general election.

The blue line is the Progressive Conservative party choice number in every CRA quarterly poll from November 2007 until the most recent one in August 2011.  The number is shown as a share of all responses, not as a share of decideds.

Look closely.

The Tories peaked at 67%, according to CRA, in early 2010'.  Since then, it’s been a jagged ride downhill.  From May 2011, the drop has been precipitous, settling out at 40% in August 2011.

While the other polls show different numbers, they are all within the margin of error for the polls.

What does that mean for the Tories?

Well, when you look at real numbers it gets pretty easy to see why the Old Man skedaddled last fall in an unholy rush.

If you consider the discrepancies between CRA’s polling numbers and the 2007 actual voting result, the Tories might have problems getting their vote to the polls.  Even if you allow that the 27 percentage points the Tories have dropped since early 2010 was all Danny-loving over-reporting by super enthusiastic respondents who weren’t real Tories anyway, the Tories would have to get all their voters from 2007 to the polls and then some to avoid losing any seats at all.

That’s something noted here early on in the campaign and it still stands.  The Tories will likely lose seats.

The Murky Shifts

The variation in the Liberal and New Democratic Party numbers looks dramatic, even if you just look at the table above.

Just remember, however, that the variation in the Liberal result in all these polls done since September 19 is within twice the margin of error for the polls. That means we likely haven’t seen any shifts of any significance.

The Liberal number from Telelink could wind up being like their Liberal number in 2007: roughly half what it wound up being as a share of eligible voters once all the ballots had been counted. Averaging the Liberal result of the first four polls (excluding Environics) gives you a number close to the 2007 actual.

The Wild Card

The NDP results show a wider range of variation.  The four polls – excluding Environics -  range from a low of 15 to a high of 27, with the high and low actually coming from polls done within days of each other.  The average of the four is 21%.  That is three times what the NDP were polling in early 2011.

Anecdotally, it seems that NDP support is focused in St. John’s and one or two districts outside Capital City. The climb in NDP support appears to be related to the drop in Tory support.  That’s not surprising in St. John’s where the NDP and Tories are closely connected and where the major shifts are likely occurring.

In some respects that shift from Tory to NDP in St. John’s is the other half of the Big Story of this election.  The Race for Second Place remains an imaginary tale at worst, and a triviality at best.

Even moreso than with the Liberals, the NDP chances of picking up seats on October 11 depends on how effectively they can get their vote out.  That’s especially true in St. John’s where the Tories tend to rack up sizeable majorities.

- srbp -

Note:  CRA and the telegram have a new poll due Thursday.  Rumour has it that MQO is in the field again and may release another poll later this week or on Monday.

Telelink releases campaign’s only independent poll #nlvotes #nlpoli

NTV and Telelink released the only independent poll of the campaign on Monday and with a week to go in the 2011 general election, things are on track for a historic election.

For starters, let’s look at the Telelink party support numbers:

• PCP 35%
• NDP 15%
• LIB    08%
• UND 42%

These numbers are ones you can trust for accuracy and reliability.  In fact, once you read along here and look at 2007 you’ll understand the real reason why CRA and other numbers are pure crap on a cracker.

Next, let’s take a look at the 2007 poll numbers.

In 2007, Telelink’s election poll turned out these numbers:

• PCP 42%
• LIB    08%
• NDP 3.5%
• UND 31.7%

The actual poll results on election night, as a share of eligible voters was:

• PCP  42%
• LIB    13%
• NDP  05%
• DNV  38%

By comparison, CRA’s August 2007 poll (adjusted to show  percent of all responses) was:

• PCP  62%
• LIB    14%
• NDP  06%
• UND  18%

All opinion polls in this province survey eligible voters. The polling firms don’t report their figures that way.  They make it seem like they are talking about share of popular vote. But if you look at it, they simply talk to anyone eligible to vote.  That means you have to compare their poll percentages to the share of eligible votes a party got on voting day.

Incidentally, if you looked at the popular vote numbers and the ones CRA actually reported (as a percentage of decideds) their accuracy doesn’t get any better.

So compared to CRA, Telelink was almost spot on for everything, except the Liberal vote.  

And with all that in mind, let’s look at what we can see in 2011.

Record Low Turnout

For starters, we can expect a record low turn-out at the polls beating the previous record set in 2007.  Given the way the Telelink numbers compared to actual then, we could be looking at half the population not bothering to get out to vote.

In patronage-addled political cultures like Newfoundland and Labrador, voting is one of the ways people pay the patron back for his benevolence. They also need to turn out to vote to show their continued loyalty to the Boss or to signal their allegiance to a new one.

Not surprisingly, in the 18 elections from 1949 to 2007, turnout was above 69% in all but three. Turnout in 1949 was 95%.

So in years when the turn-out was low, you have to wonder what the heck was on the go.  What do 1956, 1966 and 2007 have in common with 2011?  One thing they don’t have in common is overwhelming satisfaction with the party in power at the moment.

Tory support high but dropping

Conservative support sits at 35% and that’s likely where it will hold.  What’s most interesting over the past four years is the way even CRA polls have picked up a decline in Tory support.  When you take out the misleading twist of giving the numbers as a share of decideds, the Tory support has dropped dramatically since early 2010.

The Race for Second Place and Other Bullshit

While plenty of people in 2011 will be talking about the low Liberal number in the Telelink poll, you already know it’s exactly the same number the Liberals turned up the last time out in the Telelink poll.

On voting day in 2007, the actual Liberal share of eligible vote turned out to be almost double that number.  And as a share of popular vote, the Liberals turned out three times what turned up in the polls. They held three seats at the end of the night and picked up another one later on.

The polls don’t tell the story and the media reports on those polls sure don’t tell the real story.

You can also see that when you consider that the NDP polling number in 2011 (15% to 18%) is roughly what the party had in the mid-1980s.  They had two seats.

The final seat count will depend very much on what happen  on the ground this week. 

The Conservatives have undoubtedly dumped as many bodies as they can into the seats where they are under pressure.  Some of those seats are in St. John’s and others are spread across the island and into Labrador.

If the Liberals and New Democrats learned anything from the last time, they are pushing back hard as well.

There is no race for second place.  That’s a fiction invented by the media.  The real election race is being played out in those pressured seats – as many as a dozen or so – across the province.  The Liberals pose the bigger threat to the Tories because they are potentially viable in more seats.  That’s just a function of the electoral math.

What you will see Tory partisans doing is pushing hard on the theme that the Liberal Party support is collapsing.  They want people  - especially Liberal campaign workers -  to become demoralised and stay home. 

The Tories are getting plenty of help from Liberal gaffes.  They are also getting help from the news media who report fiction – like the race for second place or the importance of debates - as if it was fact.

What is really happening and what the news media often report are two very different things. 

And what happens next week after all the voting is done, well that won’t look much like the media projections to date and it may well be a lot less dramatic than people are assuming.

- srbp -