A political reality check
One of my favourite political sites is called ThreeHundredEight.com it is a site devoted to opinion polls and the examination of all poll results at the macro level. A reality check on the websites that claim that one party or the other is either over the cliff or rising to the moon!
As the EKOS poll is examined in the light of the others the 10% lead, as of yesterday, is put into perspective by the last paragraph of the latest post, "The biggest thing to take from this poll is that we're back to square one, back to October 2008. Which means no one has a reason to go to an election. "
So all of you partisans out there please comment, is this site worth the paper it is printed on or do you detect political bias) after all all sites have them!)
As the EKOS poll is examined in the light of the others the 10% lead, as of yesterday, is put into perspective by the last paragraph of the latest post, "The biggest thing to take from this poll is that we're back to square one, back to October 2008. Which means no one has a reason to go to an election. "
So all of you partisans out there please comment, is this site worth the paper it is printed on or do you detect political bias) after all all sites have them!)
3 comments:
Sure, Ben, I'll wade in. Most of your readers will know that I am generally of the Liberal persuasion. When asked during the last month about what's been going on in the polls, I've explained my view that in effect Canada actually had an 'election' in October 2009, although it was by opinion poll rather than electoral poll. In other words, people voted with their phones rather than their feet. The result of the 'vote' couldn't have been clearer: Liberals bad, Conservatives better, NDP same. What triggered this 'vote'? Well, Michael Ignatieff drew a line in the sand. People didn't like it, and they 'voted down' his proposition. Lesson learned. Meanwhile, when it might have made a real difference, Jack Layton reversed his long-averred opposition to propping up the Harper government, yet there was no detectable change to Jack's popular support, up or down. Into the electoral vacuum once again marched Stephen Harper. A lingering consequence is that now voters have a generally bad taste in their mouths about Ignatieff. Time will tell whether this will be a permanent setback, a la Stephane "Mumbles" Dion and Robert "Slippery Fingers" Stanfield, or a temporary phenomenon as happened with Gilles "Hairnet" Duceppe, Jean "Hopeless" Chretien, and even Stephen "Cowboy Bob" Harper. I wonder: by refusing to be the Neville Chamberlain of modern Canadian politics, did Ignatieff give up the chance to be the Wilt Chamberlain champion of the Canadian political court? Time will tell. One thing I'm sure of, when (not if) Harper and his acolytes finally step on one or more of their big-spending, patronage-riddled, hypocritical, militaristic, jingoistic, anti-environment, skullduggery-induced land mines, the voters will react and the polls will change. Maybe not far enough or soon enough for some of us, but they will change.
Thanks for the link, Ben.
If all we ever did was based on polls, we'd still be living in trees. This is just monkey business, Ben.
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