Thursday, September 19, 2019

what about polling?

here's the actual most recent nanos data:



as per usual, the media ignores the undecideds, which is wrong in canada.

once you bring the undecideds back in, it's easy to see that the movement over the last few days is well within the margin of error. while the undecideds have not increased (an immediate assumption when conservative numbers go up), the conservative numbers have actually barely moved, relatively to the margin - the distortion comes in the exaggerated swing by removing that ~15% undecided. so, a 2 point swing, which is in the margin, gets inflated to a 6 point one, which looks like real movement, when it actually isn't.

rather, i might suggest that nanos has been overshooting ndp numbers - he has had them higher than anybody else - and that the real movement in his numbers is a correction of something he was overshooting. it's only a few points, but he was an outlier on that. he was also maybe lowballing the conservatives, by putting them in the high 20s. so, i think this is a polling correction rather than any actual movement.

but, you know how the tory media works with this stuff - it's conditioning, it's not reporting.

if turnout is low, expect the conservatives to benefit from it. that's how they win. but, you're otherwise looking at the same basic reality we've had for a long time, which is that the liberals are mostly in a fight against voter apathy, which means they're largely running against their own record.