… what with all this chatter about polls and pollsters, it seemed like as good a time as any to dredge up the story that the fabulous Bea Vongdouangchanh and I wrote for Policy Options during the aftermath of the last election:
… what with all this chatter about polls and pollsters, it seemed like as good a time as any to dredge up the story that the fabulous Bea Vongdouangchanh and I wrote for Policy Options during the aftermath of the last election:
“Inside the poll story – who got it right, who got it wrong, and why?” by Bea Vongdouangchanh and Kady O’Malley
It wasn’t just the parties that had a lot at stake in the election. The fiercely competitive Canadian public opinion research community — the pollsters — had their own reputations and brand names on the line. The biggest winner was clearly SES Research, whose final nightly tracking poll for CPAC on January 22 had all four parties’ popular vote within one-tenth of a percentage point of the outcome. The big losers were the Strategic Counsel and Ipsos Reid, which both missed the slight Liberal rebound to 30 percent in the closing four days of the campaign. At one point in the final week, a Strategic Counsel poll for The Globe and Mail and CTV had a 42-24 Conservative lead over the Liberals; on the same day the CPAC-SES poll had only a 37-30 Tory lead. We asked Bea Vongdouangchanh and Kady O’Malley to follow up on their post-election analysis of polls for The Hill Times, and drill down deeper into the story. They learned that The Globe and Mail interviewed Nik Nanos of SES on the discrepancy between the two polls, but never ran the story. Read on. (download article (PDF))