It’s election time in Ontario. And the voters are desperate. They need help. The Ford conservatives have been campaigning for months. The hapless new democrats came up with a bunch of promises last week and we are only starting to hear murmurs from the liberals. The problem is that Mr. Ford seems to be the only one itching for an election.
But any election is a siren song to me. Since Joe Noseworthy won back my riding of York South for the CCF in 1949, I have been fascinated with the election process. And, for the most of the last 70 years, I have been lending my expertise to the liberal party.
One of the less advertised and more difficult tasks I did was working with polls and pollsters. I mention this as I read the other day where the Toronto Star is going to publish a poll aggregation called the Signal during the provincial campaign. The Star calls it an ‘election predictor.’ It is run by a political science professor. If there is any advice I could give to the neophyte owners of the Toronto Star is that the odds of getting anything right in polling are about as good as the odds of players winning at the Star owners’ new Internet casino.
You always have to remember that results of a poll are a somewhat clouded version of the past. They cannot predict the future.
And what really causes problems with political polls is that people tell lies. They tell you they are going to vote and then they don’t. As many as 35 per cent of the voters in a given riding will fail to vote.
And those who do vote can change their mind. As late as when standing behind that little screen, ballot in hand and pencil at the ready, people will have second thoughts.
I have often thought that universities might have dropped political science at the same time as they threw out the alchemists. I have always appreciated that political science grads know the difference between a liberal and a libertarian but poli-sci is not a course in sociology. They study how people vote but never seem to understand why.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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