EverDidVille
According to Ian Reid it was, indeed.
I suggest you go and read Ian's entire piece, and if you are an insider please weigh in yay or nay (or a combination).
Regardless, one passage from Ian really caught my eye:
"...I’m told the campaign pollster was fired part way through after telling Dix the polling didn’t support his pipeline strategy. Firing people for telling you the truth is a very bad sign in a campaign. On top of this, there was no targeted riding polling done in the campaign. At the end they had no clue which constituencies were in play and where they should assign resources..."
Now.
If true, this is really flabbergasting to me.
Especially the part bolded, above.
Because, again, if true, it strongly suggests that the Dipperian Braintrust had absolutely nothing solid to go on if they were relying on all the meaningless gibber-jabber that everyone concerned, including dufus outsiders like myself was watching and trying to make sense of.
Which I honestly cannot believe.
Because even Nathan Silver, never mind Eric Grenier, can't make golden nuggets out of non-stop sampling-biased codswallop.
OK?
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Subheader?.....This.
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6 comments:
I think there is another story here that hasn't been told yet...I'm not sure exactly what it is...My entirely informal inquiries among non-political civil servants here in Victoria indicates that a huge proportion of them were as pole-axed by the results as I was...having been in Europe from April 29 until the end of May....
It wasn't just NDP poling that was off the mark - as Grenier's work showed...and I've seen no real explanation for a result that, statistically, can't be seen as anything other than an outlier.
Something very strange went on on May 14 and I think we're still a long way from understanding what that was.
In the end where resources may have been redeployed became academic. The people (who vote) had chosen to support a party they knew stunk to high heaven rather than take a chance on change. A couple of previously held seats may have been retained with a more appropriate deployment of resources, no seats would have flipped with such an effort. When the people prefer rot to what you have got, that is extremely problematic, for all.
RossK
Thank you very much for the shout out. This was a tough piece to write for a whole bunch of reasons. But I'm not going to get another chance to say what I believe rather than some party line of whatever provenance.
I have two reasons for the focus on polling: Firstly, I used to be in charge of it for the Harcourt and then Clark governments and I'm very interested in it as a way for regular folks to have their unfiltered choices noticed by lawmakers and secondly, good election polling is designed to feed strategic decisions that cumulatively result in a win.
I heard a presentation by Jim Messina a week after Obama's November win in which he talked extensively about their polling strategy, which he claimed was integral to their win.
Two things were essential he said. They never - Never! - did a national poll. It was all targeted polling focused on the states they needed to get to win the thing and they knew precisely what was going on on the ground and what they had to do to hold or turn the state. They measured for success.
And they got the turnout weighting right. Clearly, in low turn-out elections, which are all elections now (that's a separate issue), weighting makes all the difference. That was the error of all the BC polling except the Liberals.
Thanks again
Ian
JK--
I've heard/read a few folks mention the possibility of an inside job possibility.
Just haven't seen any evidence of it yet.
Although, of course, such a thing would be much harder to track than the voter identification/suppression stuff.
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You really think so Beer.
I mean, if they had known that they were in big, big trouble after the first week....Do you think a real tooth and nail strategy wouldn't have made a difference?
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Thanks Ian, for the further clarification.
Going to front this.
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Not when the-people-who-vote have such contempt for ethics they will gleefully get out and support a party as crooked as the course of the Fraser.
Beer--
I just can't go there.
I honestly think that many of those same folks did not truly understand (because it was not made as plain as a Game of Thrones plot) how crooked said party really was/is.
(heckfire, go read Mason today to see what I mean...Ben Chin 'crying' because of how fantastic he thought Ms. Clark was when she just made crap up when visiting Burns Lake....sheesh)
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