Weight Problems #nlpoli

If you want to know why Forum Research’s poll is out of line with the other polls done on the provincial election, you need look no further than the data tables for the questions.

This is why pollsters should give out this information. Lots don’t.

Polling firms adjust their sample so that the sample matches the population as a who for sex, age, geography, and so on.  It’s called weighting.

Forum notes that where “appropriate,  the data has been statistically weighted by age, region, and other variables to ensure that the sample reflects the actual population according to the latest Census data.”

That’s where you get the problem.

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?

Understanding election polls #nlpoli

If you want to get a decent discussion of the Ontario election results and the way polling research tracked the campaign, take a look at a piece from The Star on Sunday.

The piece talks about different ways of conducting a poll – Internet panel,  live calls or automated calls – and compares the results of each technique with the election outcome and with different polls conducted during the last week of the campaign.

-srbp-

The Satisfaction Delusion #nlpoli

You’ll hear Conservatives, Corporate Research Associates, and some commentators play up the fact that public satisfaction with the governing Conservatives has gone up in CRA’s most recent quarterly poll.

That’s wonderful but that poll and a couple of bucks will get you a nice hot coffee at Tim’s.  Other than that,  the satisfaction numbers don”t mean much.

Just to give you a starting point, here are the Conservatives’ satisfaction numbers since the last general election in October 2011.

The Abacus Poll for VOCM #nlpoli

A new poll by Abacus Data for VOCM shows the Liberals under Dwight ball leading the governing Conservatives in every region of Newfoundland and Labrador.

According to a new VOCM-Abacus Data random telephone survey of 500 eligible voters in Newfoundland and Labrador, the NL Liberals hold a 15-point lead over the PC Party among committed voters (Liberal 49% vs. PC 34%) with the NDP well back in third at 15%.

But that’s not all.

Announce it forward #nlpoli

November is polling month in Newfoundland and Labrador.  Corporate Research Associates goes to the field for its quarterly omnibus and marketing poll.

Historically, the Conservatives have skewed their public communications to the four times a year when CRA was collecting data for public opinion polls that the company will release publicly.

The goal was simple:  the Conservatives wanted to manipulate the poll results.  By and large, it worked.  Then the Conservatives plummeted in the polls.  In order to get out of their hole, the Conservatives have been on a relentless campaign to do what they have always done, but more intensely.

So it’s a little odd that people wondered what was going on when the Conservatives announced a hike in minimum wage last Friday.  Look at the calendar.

One poll to rule them all… #nlpoli

The way things go in Newfoundland and Labrador, you can sometimes think that some things only go on here. 

Not so. 

Take a short trip, if you can spare a second,  to Manitoba and the riding of Brandon-Souris.  The editor of the Brandon Sun published an e-mail last week that went from a federal Conservative political staffer out to thousands of people on a series of distribution lists.

Liberals gain from NDP crisis. Tories no change. #nlpoli

The headline is as dramatic as NTV could make it:

Leadership crisis sends NDP tumbling to third place in NTV/MQO poll

The numbers looked bad for the Dippers:  Grits at 52% of decideds.  Tories at 29% and the NDP in the basement at 18%.

Then you take a closer look and you see something else entirely.

The NAPE Poll Income #nlpoli

As it turns out, Harris-Decima used household income not individual income for weighting the poll they did for NAPE. Keith Dunne, NAPE’s communications co-ordinator tweeted the correct information on Thursday morning.

Your humble e-scribbler thought it was individual income and therefore concluded – wrongly – that there was a skew in the poll toward higher income urbanites.  That didn’t invalidate the survey results but it might have explained the strength of the rejection of the provincial government’s budget.  The Tories might have had a chance to bounce back politically, especially among the lower income types out there.

Turns out that hope was pretty much dashed.

Self Skew-ered #nlpoli

Two thirds of tax filers in Newfoundland and Labrador report incomes of less than $35,000 per year.

The Harris-Decima poll released by the Newfoundland and labrador Association of Public Employees on Wednesday has only 27% of the sample with an income less than $40,000 per year.

Still, the results show that the provincial government either didn’t have a communications strategy or whatever strategy they had failed miserably.

In fact, it was a stunning, utter, complete, abject failure of their entire communications effort.

Tories below 30 #nlpoli

By now you’d be living in a cave if you hadn’t heard any news of the latest Corporate Research Associates poll.

The NDP are slightly ahead of the Tories and both are about 10 percentage points ahead of the Liberals.  More people want Lorraine Michael as Premier than want Kathy Dunderdale.  And a majority are unsatisfied with the government.

Now this is an historic set of poll results as Don Martin tweeted to tease people about the release on Monday morning.  The release doesn’t make any reference to that, preferring instead just reporting the results blandly.  By contrast, Mills hyped the living crap out of poll results a few years ago that hit historic highs. 

The Secret of Their Distress #nlpoli

Not content with just one round of fascinating public opinion information, NTV decided to unleash a second evening of news about how the public feels about Muskrat Falls.

The responses are based on the same panel conducted for NTV by MQO and first reported on Tuesday.

Let’s take a look at the results, as reported, and then make some observations.

Support but lacking sufficient information - the NTV/MQO Poll #nlpoli

The more questions you ask, the more information you get. The more information you have, the more accurate a picture you can draw of anything.

In this case, it’s public opinion.

On Monday, the provincial government/Nalcor front group released the results of a single poll question put by Corporate Research Associates to a random sample of residents of Newfoundland and Labrador.

It showed 66% of respondents supported the Muskrat Falls project.

But on Tuesday, NTV News released the results of a poll it had commissioned from MQO.  More questions.  More information and a much different picture from Monday.

The sum of all fears #nlpoli

Kathy Dunderdale says that it is gratifying to have the support of the majority of the people of the province, as recent polls show, according to the Premier.

In another corner, former natural resources minister Shawn Skinner thinks it is great that the Conservatives have the support of six in 10 of the people surveyed.  He was referring to the responses in a recent Corporate Research Associates poll asking people whether they were satisfied or dissatisfied with the current government’s performance.

Shawn and Kathy missed some rather important things.

Who wants to play Brutus? #nlpoli

Just as they ate up the Corporate Research Associates’ quarterly poll when the numbers favoured the local Conservatives,  the local media have reported the latest CRA numbers with equal enthusiasm now that the Tory numbers are lousy.

To put it simply, the numbers confirmed the general thrust of two recent polls and the local media have reported them faithfully. As CBC put it:

Kathy Dunderdale and Newfoundland and Labrador's Progressive Conservatives continue to lose ground among voters, a new tracking poll suggests.

Gander at the goosing #nlpoli

Apparently, your humble e-scribbler got on Steve Kent’s nerves.

The Conservative politician and his friends have been bombarding Twitter and Open Line shows since the middle of July will all sorts of their old poll-goosing tactics.  So yours truly has been re-tweeting some of the little comments with an added remark like “Gee, you’d swear a poll was coming.”

Small stuff.

But apparently enough to go right up Kent’s nose in a bad way.

When Johnny Cab breaks #nlpoli

Last week’s Environics poll caused more than a few people in the province to have a few sleepless nights trying to find a way to prove it was a crock or nothing to sweat.

Those were the Tories.

The NDP wasted no time getting a fund-raising e-mail on the go.

Oddly enough, and as an aside, a couple of prominent Dippers – Jack Harris and Lana Payne – both joined the Tories in trying to dismiss the poll as a one-off.  Maybe their love of Muskrat Falls is clouding their judgment.

Anyway, and meanwhile…

The Liberals were wondering if the poll was good (they were up overall) or bad (they were still polling frig-all of any consequence in the province’s vote-rich capital region.

For the rest of you, here are some further ruminations to help you sort it all out.

The Happiness Index #nlpoli

Leave it to labradore to come up with a new way to look at poll results.

He took the results of “satisfaction” questions in polls going back about a decade.  he netted them out, meaning he subtracted the dis-satisfieds from the satisfieds.

What he got is very interesting.