Even after terrible prognosticating in 2013, polling firms still capture the attention of pundits and voters
It’s been more than a decade since British Columbians broke up with political polling. It wasn’t us, it was them; pollsters so disastrously wrong about the outcome of the 2013 provincial election that it shattered the trust between the public and the prognosticators.
“It’s an insurmountable gap,” Barb Justason, declared to The Tyee, basing her ironclad confidence on an online/telephone survey of 600 British Columbians. Throughout the campaign, Clark had tried to brush aside the doomsday polling with what sounded like logical arguments, which were nonetheless mocked.
It’s entertaining, for sure, and it helps feed into the horse-race narrative that dominates political coverage. But the really valuable stuff is the internal polling that parties pay for, which roll through multiple days, where they drill down into specific ridings, issues and candidates, applying better weighting of variables like voter turnout trends amongst demographic groups.
He has cited brand confusion between the B.C. and federal Conservative parties, the phrasing of the polling questions and the use of popular vote numbers to extrapolate 93 individual riding contests under our first-past-the-post system.
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