Sunday, September 14, 2008

Issues with Polling Media

Last Canadian election i used a website called nodice.ca for all the pre-election polls. I find it helpful in determining how Canadians are reflecting to the media surrounding the parties. However, over the past 5 days i have noticed there has been no updating of the polls on their site. During election times there are polls being released everyday; typically nodice would be reporting these.

if you go to their website on this years election: http://www.nodice.ca/elections/canada/
one can see their last day of updating the polls was september 9th. That day, the conservatives had 37% of the popular vote, the Liberals 26%, the NDP 19%, and the green party 10%.

However this was said on a friday article on cbc.ca:

"in the Harris/Decima survey, the Conservatives showed a lead nationally of 41 per cent of public support, followed by the Liberals at 26 per cent, while the NDP were at 14 per cent."

these polls were conducted three days after the last updated poll on nodice. Harris/Decima is a poll that nodice always has reported in the past.

The new Harris/Decima poll suggests that the Conservatives have broken into majority territory. However it is not being reported by nodice.ca. To whom's advantage is it when a poll showing a conservative majority is not being published? Any talk of majority could scare voters away from the conservatives. But it also could potentially show the lack of leadership and ability of Dion to attract voters.

Either way, polls this early on in the election mean very little. Last election at around this time, the Liberals had a strong 10 point lead over the conservatives, and the conservatives ended up fighting back to win the election.

1 comment:

Graham said...

I think either result is beneficial to the conservatives. Lack of reporting does let them surreptitiously sneak under the radar and beat the fuck out of Dion with a majority, and announcing it makes it a "sure thing" which will draw even more conservative votes, because a fairly large percentage will always vote for stability at any cost. It's win win once it's at this point I think.