#Elxn42...It's D.O. Day In Canada...

It'sAllANumbers
GameVille


D. O. stands for 'drop-out' and today, September 28th is it, the last day a no-chance candidate can remove themselves from a ballot for the good of the country (i.e. to make sure that he small percentage of votes they receive don't help elect a Con.

And, despite the best efforts of David Beers of the Tyee, it looks like very few (and/or zero) no-chance candidates are going to do the right thing.

Of course, it's tough to really blame these folks.

After all, if they have no shot most of them are probably running as also rans for all the right reasons.

Plus, if they screw over the party they're working with now, at this late date, they will likely never, ever get another shot with said party.

But.

It turns out that there is something else to consider here.

Which is that many of these candidates appear to know just as little as the rest of us about where they really stand in their riding.

Kai Nagata, also writing in the Tyee, explains:

...Perhaps the most expensive yet fleeting data (for candidates) is from opinion polls. We're not talking about national surveys, published by newspapers, which draw averages from a couple thousand people sprinkled across all 338 ridings in Canada. That information is all but useless to a campaign grinding it out at the riding level. That's why the parties do wave after wave of riding-level polling.

There are rare cases when these party polls are leaked strategically, as the NDP did in Justin Trudeau's riding this month. But most of the time internal numbers are a closely guarded secret. So secret, in fact, the candidates themselves are out of the loop.

I've had conversations now with contestants from four different parties in this election, and none of them has been willing or able to talk about specific numbers.

I would love to be proven wrong, but my theory is parties are hiding real data from candidates, mostly to keep them in the fight. I ran this by two different pollsters that have done work for parties in elections. Their reaction was the same: oh no, you don't tell the people who are running -- whose faces appear on the signs, whose reputations are tied to the outcome. They don't need to know...

Sound crazy to you?

Well, it does to me.


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Interestingly, Mr. Nagata is part of a group, the Dogwood Initiative, that is doing it's best to get riding-specific numbers out British Columbian voters so that we, the 70%, can take matters into our own hands....For example, they have taken two polls in NorthVan over the last two months and the numbers indicate that votes going to either the Dipper or NVG's Green candidate could help elect the Con (i.e. the non-Con to vote for in that riding is the Liberal)