Friday, December 09, 2005

Conservative Bloggers desperate to ruin our fun

Now, before I begin let me say that I put very little stock in polls done this early in the campaign. I think we all know this thing is a long way from over, and as others have said far more eloquently than I the key to understanding them is to see the trend and not the actual numbers. My best hope for them is that if they can hold up for a while Canadians may see the Conservatives can't win; and not wanting another minority, switch to the Liberals. Obviously this is an optimistic view at this point, but also not an entirely impossible scenario.

That being said there has been a lot of revelry the past couple of days over the Liberals breaking the magic majority number of %40. Of course I suspect this was more of a sigh of relief than anything else. Some polls are showing the margin to be much closer.

However some Conservative bloggers are grasping at straws to completely invalidate the two polls that have come out showing the Liberals with a healthy lead. (Yeah right, imagine if they were the ones with the huge lead, they'd be picking out curtains for 24 Sussex! -Ed.)

AlbertaAvenue offers up a rather feeble rebuttal by attacking the pollsters themselves.
"this (celebrating the poll numbers) demonstrates not only gullibility, but also a simplistic mind (to put it mildly). These pollsters tell us precious little about their methodology, which renders their polls nothing but pure rubbish."
Speaking of a simplistic mind.....

SES Methodology (Click to Enlarge)



Leger Methodology (Click to Enlarge)



Sources:
Leger
SES

I guess reading isn't his forte. There is something that's rubbish, but it isn't the pollsters, or their polls.

1 comment:

Monkey Loves to Fight said...

I'll admit, the great variation in polls makes in tough to know who to believe. Ipsos-Reid shows it neck and neck, the Strategic Counsel and Decima show the Liberals leading by amount the same amount as last time around, while Leger Marketing and SES show the Liberals in majority territory. The only consistent thing here is each polling company has shown their numbers, with the exception of SES, to be relatively stable. I suspect the difference has more to do with how the question is asked since each polling company asks slightly different questions and due to the fact there are a lot of undecided voters a slight variation in question can really alter the results. After the debates have been held, more voters will have made up their minds and I expect we will have a clearer picture on the actual results.