Your entire post simply boils down to one thing: you don’t understand how to use polls, not that they diverge from reality.
Your first point is no different from that of polling of House (and to a lesser extent, Senate) seats, or polling of the UK elections. It’s simply saying that an opinion poll of who people would vote for, in aggregate, says nothing about the actual electoral results. It does have a correlation, but it’s not a 1-1 outcome, and more importantly, if you have the breakdown of the individual polling you can model the outcomes, as pollsters already do when they do things like report on likely election outcomes.
Secondly, as long as the methodology is public, the questions are public, the data are public, it doesn’t matter how liberal/conservative the pollsters themselves are as you can take the raw data and then adjust them appropriately. But again, this is about outcomes, whereas you’re just noting generic voting intentions.
The polls in and of themselves are not necessarily wrong, you just have no idea how to understand and use them. The issues being discussed in the posts before yours were about how the relevant people didn’t believe in the polls in and of themselves, which could well stem from an understanding of polling that is on the same level as yours. What they were disputing is that whether what the polls were showing, i.e. voting intentions, were reflective of reality or not, not whether or not the polls would be accurate in predicting the winner.
This is exactly what I am trying to say, however in this thread and the US thread, the vast majority of posters where saying X was going to win because the poll say they are. Dems are going to win this state because a highly respected and accurate pollster (as per both Dems/Reps) indicated as much.
When I say wrong, I mean wrong when used for predicting an outcome. They point is I don’t use them to predict election outcomes, I don’t see much use for them as they generally don’t really serve a purpose that I am interested in vs how the general public view them. I argue against using polls in order to predict an outcome, which is the exact opposite of others who say, look at the polls, the Liberals/Democrats are going to win this election. The only interesting thing on some of the polls is if you dive down into the numbers, as they show much more interesting data other than they generic XYZ is leading the polls, they are going to win. The interesting thing about the current polls is the breakdown of voter intent, within age groups. I find it interesting as it essentially divides the country into haves and have nots, the youth that are spinning their wheels as they cant afford a house or the cost of living is eating up too much of their income, and the people that already have houses, retired comfortably. These stats reflect well for me as I am in the middle along with the vast majority of my friends, so we have adult children that are falling way, way behind while their grandparents are oblivious to their struggles. They might hear of the struggles however they don’t understand it as they have never in their life experienced the mismatch between income and expenses when they were the same age (talking particular about accommodation), and they get their information from traditional media. So maybe you are correct and I am not using them correctly.
I found the USA polls interesting because of the breakdown of ethnicity, as the republicans grew in support when looking at hispanic and black voters. I on a regular basis disagreed with using polls as indicators on who was going to win, however have always found that there are some polls that are reasonably accurate after adding margin of error, unfortunately its not always the same pollsters. I always found it amusing when people would look at, for example, Bloomberg polling and deciding that Harris would win all the swing states because she was above the margin of error. I don’t really know what these types of polls are trying to provide.
It is exactly nothing like what you have said above, and indeed in the context of what the discussion was about.
You have absolutely no understanding of the polls, and I have no idea where you got your mistaken belief about the US elections thread either.
They are not wrong either. In the days before the elections the estimate was a virtual dead heat or a narrow Trump win, which was the result.
You simply do not understand how to use them.
Your entire view of them is exactly as mistaken as what you presume the general public do.
This sums up all your posts on the topic. To recapitulate, the original discussion revolved around this:
Which was a direct quote disputing the actual results from the polls. Nothing to do with interpretations, absolutely nothing to do with the rest of what you have typed. The only conclusion possible to draw from this is you read nothing of the discussion at all, saw the word “poll”, and decided to jump in with your own narrative, that has absolutely nothing to do with whatever was being discussed.
I dont recall a single post saying anything of the sort. Not saying there werent any, but it certainly was not how the general discussion was driven.
There were plenty from you arguing that a positive Dem poll didnt mean they would win, and loads of responses saying “yes we know, that is not what polls are for.”
I cannot find it now, but I know @Arminius has commented before on how Gretsky has managed to have his reputation among Canadians soured by his pro-Trump positions. This is a deep dive into that
Just been to a early vote, never seen a turnout like this. Over 30m wait, and growing longer by the minute as tons of people pour in. You can early vote here the entire weekend (18,19 or 20th), 9am to 9pm. I find it strange that its over the Easter weekend.
Same in Ottawa according to a couple of friends. Wasn’t too bad in Pontiac, but rural ridings usually aren’t.
Some clown in Ottawa West Nepean voted, whipped on a Poilievre shirt and started chanting slogans. Apparently the people in line started booing him, but that may have been because he threw in a ‘Let’s Go Leafs’. The wait was close to an hour
Elections Canada (official) received more than double number of ballots compared to this point in 2021. The general consensus is that it does not favor one party or the other, it just indicates that people believe it’s a very consequential election.
Let’s hope that the Canadian public has learnt from their southern neighbours and realised that not voting is tantamount to letting the lunatics run the asylum.
To a large degree, the lunatics have been running the asylum for the past 10 years, some of the policies have been an abject failure. It’s either a status quo or change type election.
The voting is not that well organized, you can be first in line however others that are 50th in place could be called first. It’s based on grouping, so my district has about 10 groups.
A week ago, I had a sense that the Liberals were starting to spin their wheels a little, and we were headed toward a Liberal minority. However, it has been a bad week for the Conservatives. The narrative about big rallies (not as big as claimed) and not believing the polls isn’t playing well. But the critical element is that is becoming increasingly clear that a large segment of the Ontario provincial PC Party wants to see Poilievre fail. The Byrne-Teneycke feud seems to be much more extensive than just individual, and a lot of provincial Conservatives are mailing it in and preparing for the next leadership race than this election.
Interestingly, that seems to be just an Ontario phenomenon. But it feels like the coalition that Harper put together back in 2003 to unify Canadian Alliance and the PCs might be splintering - it was always held together fundamentally by the pragmatism of winning.
I don’t know that much about the other conservative party, not even sure if they are more or less conservative. All I know is that they are completely irrelevant, and might not even get a single seat. This is from an Ontario perspective as I know Saskatchewan has some type of different conservative party that is aligned to the main CP, but have not paid enough attention to write about it.
If Carney is indeed different to Trudeau, as he claims, hopefully he sticks to that if he is elected. Using the same policies from the last 10 years will not end well. I still think it will be conservative win.
I mean the provincial-level Progressive Conservatives, who have been a bedrock for the federal Conservatives for about 20 years, sharing a lot of the basic structure (and volunteers). It doesn’t appear that Ford has any interest in running Federally, but he doesn’t seem at all invested in Poilievre winning, and that is showing up in how effective the Cons are.
