Pollsters were first in line for post-election ridicule following Alberta’s April 23 election, which saw the incumbent Progressive Conservatives come from behind to defeat the front-running Wildrose Alliance. Wildrose led the PCs by between eight and 12 points in polling conducted throughout most of the four-week campaign, and were projected to form a majority government by the final week.
Election night results refuted the polls, however, with Alison Redford’s Progressive Conservatives capturing 44 per cent of the popular vote and a 61 seat majority. In the end it was Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Alliance that trailed by 9.5 percentage points. The Prairie-populist revival was able to claim only 17 of the Alberta Legislature’s 87 seats with 34.5 per cent of the popular vote. Both the Liberals and the NDP fell just shy of 10 per cent of the popular vote, and took five and four seats, respectively.
“Pundits scramble to explain how polls got it wrong,” The Edmonton Journal proclaimed.
“How did Alberta election pollsters get it wrong,” a CTV online report asked.
But pollsters are taking issue with the charge that they spent the election misinforming the public.
“I don’t think that’s really a fair assessment,” Mario Canseco, VP of communications for Angus-Reid Public Opinion, told The Hill Times last week. “You almost feel like a hockey goalie. You stop everything for two and a half periods, one gets by and everybody criticizes you for it.”
Angus-Reid’s Alberta post-mortem cites a significant “late switch” among voters for the unexpected final result. According to the firm’s analysis, 61 per cent of voters had reported settling on a party prior to the last week of the campaign.
Ms. Smith and her party were riding high going into the final week of the election. An Ipsos-Reid poll conducted immediately after the April 12 leaders debate between Ms. Smith, Ms. Redford, Liberal leader Raj Sherman and NDP leader Brian Mason found that 37 per cent of respondents thought Ms. Smith had won the debate, while 28 per cent selected Ms. Redford. Mr. Sherman and Mr. Mason were a distant third and fourth.
However, Wildrose had a significant change in fortunes in the final week of the campaign. Calgary-Greenway candidate Ron Leech told a radio station that being Caucasian gave him an advantage in representing constituents, and Allan Hunsperger, running in Edmonton-Southwest, became the focus of media scrutiny for blogging that gays would “suffer the rest of eternity in the lake of fire” if they didn’t change. Neither candidate won a seat in the election.
Ms. Smith defended her candidates on the grounds of free speech throughout the campaign’s final week, and herself came under scrutiny for questioning climate change science. The Wildrose leader had managed to downplay her party’s advocacy for “conscience rights” early on in the campaign. The policy would allow caregivers and other professions to deny providing services based on personal convictions.
Mr. Canseco suggested that the final week was a time of second thoughts for the Alberta electorate.
“[P]eople told us earlier in the week that they were voting Wildrose and then after all the stories came out about Lake of Fire and such, they decided to change their mind,” Mr. Canseco observed. “If [Wildrose] had handled some of those comments differently, some voters who were attracted to Wildrose as an alternative may have stayed there.”
Stephen Carter, who previously served as Ms. Redford’s chief of staff and was a key strategist on her campaign, raised doubts about the integrity of the polls that had been conducted throughout the race.
“There is an ongoing battle with pollsters: Do we reflect what is actually occurring, or do we lead to what actually happens?” Mr. Carter told The Edmonton Journal. “And we’re not sure. The science is up in the air on that.”
Mr. Carter also chastised media for using poll numbers to influence public opinion.
Alberta-based progressive blogger and journalist David Climenhaga told CTV that “pollsters, as a whole, really blew it.”
However, Forum Research president and CEO Lorne Bozinoff stood by the polling industry in an interview last week.
Mr. Bozinoff pointed out that all three polling methodologies—online, phone, and interactive voice response calling—were used by pollsters, and they unanimously reported Wildrose’s dominance throughout the campaign.
Forum Research caught the beginning of a drastic swing in the electorate in its final poll on Sunday, April 22. The poll, released late on Sunday evening in accordance with CRTC restrictions barring the reporting of new poll results on election day, found that Wildrose led the PCs by only 2 percentage points going into the election day, with the parties garnering 38 and 36 per cent of the vote, respectively. That poll gave 12 per cent support to the NDP and 10 per cent to the Liberals. The poll suggests that there was a PC surge in the final 24 hours of the campaign that took support from Wildrose, the Liberals and the New Democrats.
“To say that Wildrose had a bad week is an understatement,” Mr. Bozinoff observed. “They had a terrible week and they didn’t respond the right way. The fact that the party didn’t distance itself or deny or censure those candidates for those comments, in fact they tried to justify them under free speech, and I think that made the Wildrose a little too extreme, and really caused a lot of people to reconsider at the last minute.”
Mr. Canseco said that the take home for political parties was to do a better job of scrutinizing their candidates and responding to crises. He said that local candidates are coming under heavier public scrutiny after so many rookie NDP MPs were elected in the last federal election.
“Everybody is googling their own candidate, and that can cause people to change their minds,” Mr. Canseco said. “We always ask people if they’re certain of their vote. They’ll say, yes, but if two days later somebody talks about a lake of fire or the Aryan race, that will change people’s minds!”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: CHRIS PLECASH
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