Pollsters defend numbers as results tallied
CTV.ca News Staff
June 29, 2004 3:06 PM ET
Pollsters are defending themselves after Monday's election results appear to have flown in the face of their predictions.
After five weeks of conducting phone interviews with more than 25,000 Canadians, pollsters said the race was neck-and-neck.
Ipsos-Reid predicted in its final poll, released June 25, that about 32 per cent of decided voters would vote for the Liberals, with decided voter support for the Conservatives trailing slightly at 31 per cent. The poll information was gathered from Monday June 21 to Wednesday June 23.
Yet at the end of the day Monday, the Liberals won 36.7 per cent of the vote, while the Conservatives won 29.6 per cent.
Ipsos-Reid's John Wright says all pollsters continued to poll throughout the weekend before Monday's election, and realized that voters were shifting to the Liberals. But the company could not release the data because of laws preventing poll information influencing voters on election day.
"There's nothing missing here," Wright said of the numbers gap. "There's a reporting lag from Wednesday night to Sunday night."
He says polls take several days to compile before the results can be published. "It's not that we didn't catch it, it's just that we couldn't report it."
Not all pollsters are saying they saw it coming. Donna Dasko, a pollster with Environics, told Canadian Press she had never seen anything like the Liberals' rebound in the last few days of the election.
Many observers are questioning what exactly happened to the horse race pollsters promised.
Political scientist Ned Franks wonders why the polls were wrong for so long. He told Canadian Press that pollsters should answer a few questions, instead of posing them.
But Wright says he is confident his numbers were accurate.
"There's always this great rush to judgment," Wright said. "We the pollsters will wear hair shirts and be publicly flogged, but I think we will survive this day to move on."
Wright says that Ontario voters proved to be the turning point in election results.
"We always said Ontario was volatile," said Wright. "We said this was going to be 401 election campaign."
Election night results showed support for the Liberals in Ontario jumped from 38 per cent to 44 per cent.
Fellow Ipsos-Reid pollster Darrell Bricker concedes the results were stunning, but he says they weren't entirely unexpected.
Wright says that post-debate polls indicated that 21 per cent of decided voters nationally and 22 per cent of those in Ontario said that they could switch their vote.
It appears that voters in Ontario did just that, with more than 340,000 people switching their vote in Ontario.
"You see a six-point move in this province, it's a big footprint, and it yielded 25 seats (for Liberals), and we've been saying that all along."
He says Ipsos-Reid's final polling numbers in Ontario Sunday night were almost identical to the final result, with 48 per cent support for Liberals, 30 per cent for Conservatives, 16 per cent for the NDP, and 5 per cent for the Greens.
Wright cites Conservative MP Randy White's comments and Stephen Harper's statement of the West being "back in the driver's seat" as influences on the Ontario voters' shift.
He also says the weekend influx of Liberal negative ads shown in the province -- featuring Harper, former prime minister Brian Mulroney, and former premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves -- had an impact.
"Weekends can matter," Wright said.
"Over the weekend," Bricker said, "quite clearly, the Liberal campaign got to them and they did switch."
Undecided voters played a negligible part in the Liberals' Ontario resurgence, Wright adds.
"People always talk about the undecided, but these are decided voters who still have choices to make. The undecided vote stayed relatively calm all the way through this at 13 per cent, plus we're never going to get 100 per cent on anything."
Wright also says that people got what they wanted in a Liberal minority government supported by the NDP, as was predicted in an another Ipsos-Reid poll released on CTV on Saturday.
But Franks says those who pay top dollar for polls might have their doubts whether they got their money's worth, and even joked that the auditor general should audit the pollsters.
Wright defends pollsters' performance and says that those who doubt should appreciate the difficult situation the election presented to those trying to make sense of where voters were headed.
"The fact of the matter is that everybody was in field in a volatile election, and everybody was either predicting too close to call or a minority tilting one way or the other," he said.
"And guess what? Democracy triumphed."