Saturday, October 13, 2012

The Latest From Angus Reid: The Thrilla In The Middle Is....

....Over


AllThePollsThatFit
NotEviVille

The latest from Angus Reid on the British Columbia political scene is out, and there is a whole lot of interesting stuff there  (warning: pretty big pdf).

The table above is one of the things I found to be most interesting on first reading.

Why?

Well, because the massive Dipper/LINO split amongst female voters that will almost certainly doom Ms. Clark, given her penchant for grandstanding and politicizing of everything, including tragedy (and, yes, I am talking about very recent events), is still there, but now there is also a significant differential among male voters as well.

But that is not what really caught my eye.

Instead....

Check out the splits by income.

Do you see what I see?

Yup, that's right.

The middle is, for all intents and purposes, also now completely gone for The Snook and her (still remaining) friends.

And, heckfire, even the top-end has tightened considerably.

Wow.

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Now, that is not to say that there is not some scary stuff in there for the hard-rock minders of the right that left the Party of the Snook high and dry recently...Maybe even enough to, oh I dunno, have forced them to make a play for a premature LibCon fusion before, rather than after, the coming May 2013 election?....More on that theory later... (and yes, it just might include the spectre of the resurrection of Horse 1A).

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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Need a statistician stat!

The margin of error is 3.5%

At the $100K+ income level the difference is 7%.

Does this mean that the BC Liberals (32%) and BC NDP (39%) are 'statistically tied' amongst the $100K+ people?

RossK said...

Anon--

From the Wiki, which isn't half bad (+/- 7.5%) on this subject:

...the margin of error as generally calculated is applicable to an individual percentage and not the difference between percentages, so the difference between two percentage estimates may not be statistically significant even when they differ by more than the reported margin of error...

Now, the thing to remember is that there is an assumption of normal distributions when these things are estimated - and such distributions are not linear. Thus, the closer you get to the distal aspect of the margins, especially when you are comparing two estimates, the fuzzier things get.

Regardless, that high end comparison is much tighter than I thought it would be....But look at the Con number in that category also....Looks to me like, when rich folks forsake the LINO's, a whole lot of them still go the way of 'I'm alright Jack, so get your hands off that damnable ladder I'm pullin' up!'

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Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link.

I stared at the Wiki for awhile and there were words I understood.

What I realized though was that the $100K+ household people only make up (picks number from the air)* about 20% of the population.

In a sample of 800 that would mean only about 160 $100K+ household people were asked, and therefore the margin would be an almost meaningless ~7% (guessing it lies between 5% at 384 people and 10% at 96 people).

* I tried Statistics Canada, but couldn't fathom their stuff either.

RossK said...

Ya, but the percentage still comes from the total asked...If those 160 were asked separate questions, then the MOE would go up accordingly given the decrease in sample size.

Scotty on Denman said...

We used to call statistics "sadistics" when compelled to study the art. It's been called one of the three kinds of lie but I like the definition that statistics is like a bikini: what it reveals is very interesting; what it conceals is vital. When stats are unfavourable to them, politicians always say they never pay them any mind. But we know politicians, pundits and voters all pay something to see the latest polls.

I follow Lao Tzu's preamble that we can't know everything and the little bit we do know is really just screen-sorted siftings reassembled in way that makes sense to us. We can find beauty there nonetheless, in this case, what stands out, bucks a trend or dashes a cherished theory (or two.)

Gender dichotomy is so fundamental it forms the basis of analysis and belief from yin and yang of the ancient Chinese sage to the division of heaven and earth of Abrahamic tradition and everything mystical or statistical in between. Nothing in the present poll is very surprising in this regard except maybe, to my surprise, anyway, more women support the BC Conservatives than men, which might support my own theory that BC Liberal support defaults to Conservative for ethical, not necessarily ideological reasons...or maybe it's just one of those statistical aberrations.

less Kertosis ("blockiness") is seen in the trend-able triplets of age and income where the stats reflect conventional wisdom: those who have gotten what they need, and more, tend to support the conservative notion of keeping it for themselves; those who are still busy getting (fearing penury and envying secure wealth) are somewhat less right wing, I think because they recognize, consciously or not, how much social benefit might help them grasp the golden ring; those who haven't got and realize they may never get everything they need naturally support the socialists. Because they often do with less because they have to share what they do have, they gravitate to policies of societal sharing. Nothing too surprising there, either.

Green support tapers off with increasing age and income of respondents. At one end it's hard being green; at the other it's hard paying green. Pretty typical.

But why are men three times as supportive of Independents than women? Moreover, why are older respondents more supportive of Independents? And that still-getting-while-the-getting's-good category, why are they three times as supportive? Perhaps this is like penny-stock investing, differences being more due to incremental precision than anything else.

All statistics should be predicated by the assumptions made. In this case, as usual, our Single-Memember-Plurality electoral system prevents us from gleaning how various support will be distributed amongst provincial ridings. Still fun, though.

RossK said...

Thanks Scotty.

lenin's ghost said...

well said, Scotty!