Modern era not kind to pollsters

Canadians knew the threeway race couldn’t last forever. And indeed, with two weeks until Election Day, a party has begun to pull into the lead.

Of course, in what has become a signature trait of the 2015 election, polls differ on exactly which party.

A Nanos Research survey shows the Liberals gaining a dramatic lead at the expense of the NDP. The Liberals are at 35 per cent support, the Conservatives at 31 per cent and the NDP are trailing at 24 per cent.

One from EKOS shows the Conservatives maintaining a commanding first place ( 33 per cent), which they’ve apparently held since mid- September.

In the time of John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson, clipboard- wielding pollsters would go door to door, asking Canadians their voting intentions come election day.

But the modern era has not been kind to pollsters.

Despite popular belief, polling firms are able to call cellphones, but the rejection rate is even higher due to owners fretting about using up minutes.

Roll it all together, and Canadian opinion polls are frequently decided by that bizarre subset of Canadians who pick up unfamiliar calls — and don’t immediately hang up.

Pollsters try to address the problem by employing a top- secret formula that weighs some responses more heavily than others — but there’s only so much that can be fixed when 90 per cent of cellphone users aren’t picking up.

The margins of error are increasing, and with the first three- way race in living memory, slight changes can have noticeable effects on the published results.

EKOS uses robocalls. Nanos, meanwhile, uses live interviewers calling both cellphones and land lines.

By looking at the aggregate data, analysts are able to pull some truths out of the sheer tonnage of 2015 opinion polling data.

“The aggregate trends over time tell you that the NDP is in sustained decline, and the Liberals are in a sustained rise and so are the Conservatives,” said David Moscrop, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia.

And when those numbers are plugged into seat projections, it’s looking like absolutely nobody will be coming close to a majority.

“When you’re a professor, everybody wants to know what you think will happen in the election,” said Zachary Spicer, an associate professor in the department of political science at Brock University.

“It looks like the Liberals are going to have more seats than the NDP, and I would hazard a guess that the prime minister will probably be Harper,” he said.

In this regular feature until Election Day, writers capture a telling moment in time from the 2015 campaign trail.