When you take a poll to help sell newspapers, how serious can you be? Does the poll even matter if it restates the obvious? It is giving the entire business of polls a bad name.
Take the Toronto Star. The Star hires Forum Research to take a poll. Last week the poll was on the candidates for the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leadership. It is a very cheap poll. Since it is so unimportant neither the Star not Forum Research really want to waste much money. They knew the answers before they took the poll.
Would you believe that 60 per cent of the Ontario residents polled have no idea? Mind you a third of those people said ‘None of the above.’ They got better answers when they narrowed the poll down to Conservative supporters.
This is what happens when you use that silly interactive telephone response system. It supposedly dials at random and asks automated questions of whoever answers. The way people talk to those calls, they should have their mouths washed out with a strong soap.
This type of survey is based on quantity of answers, not quality. They answers are suspect before you even start to count. Take another poll the next day and you will find wild swings in the results. And when you just pick the ones who said they voted Conservative, you not only get a much smaller sample but you might get ones who know something of the questions.
So are you surprised that MPP Christine Elliot, Jim Flaherty’s widow from Whitby-Oshawa, got 14 per cent support? MPP Lisa MacLeod of Nepean-Carleton was second with 9 per cent. Two male MPPs in the race and the one MP were at 6 per cent or less.
And if you want to give any credibility at all to any of those figures, they tell you that there is a long way to go before Conservatives in Ontario get to pick a new provincial leader next May. It is far too early to place any bets on this political race or to consider publishing a morning line.
But it just goes to show that the Toronto Star and its faithful pollster are keeping you abreast of the political scene in Ontario.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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