Nailed it: How polls got June 7 vote right
Popular-vote tally was within margin of error in nearly every final survey
The polls were right.
Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford won a majority on June 7, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath secured official opposition status for her party, Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals were decimated, and the Greens finally got a seat.
Just as the dozen or so research firms that polled during the campaign suggested.
“In this election, every polling firm did a great job and we used multiple methodologies across the board — from online to live interview phone to IVR (interactive voice response calls),” says Craig Worden, president of Pollara Strategic Insights.
“At the final poll, we are trying to predict and model what the actual turnout electorate will look like, which is always very difficult,” he says, noting “turnout spiked by seven points over the last election, which should have posed more of a problem for us.”
After the ballots were counted, the popular-vote tally was 40.5 per cent for the Tories, 33.6 per cent for the NDP, 19.6 per cent for the Liberals and 4.6 per cent for the Greens. That was within the margin of error for nearly every firm’s final survey of the campaign.
“It is a bit of a myth that the pollsters have gotten it wrong in many elections. There has been the odd election here and there, and they’ve attracted a lot of attention, but by and large we do get it right,” Worden says.
“There was a great deal of consistency in the polls throughout the campaign and not just on election day, and one of the reasons for that is … there was a lot of polling being done on an almost constant basis,” he says. “We were all releasing polls at the same time.”
Lorne Bozinoff, president of Forum Research, took a lot of heat from the Tories for his poll published in the Star on May 25 that showed the NDP at 47 per cent to 33 per cent for the Tories, 22 per cent for the Liberals and 4 per cent for the Greens.
“Before that poll came out everyone was starting to show that (NDP) surge,” Bozinoff says, pointing out that it seemed as “if the Tories changed their guns from Wynne to Horwath based on these public polls.”
“They can say: ‘oh yeah, it was never close.’ So I don’t know what their (internal) polls were showing, but they didn’t start doing that until these polls started coming out. They were focusing on Wynne all the time, and then they suddenly changed direction,” he says.
On June 6, Forum’s final poll before the election had the Tories at 39 per cent, the NDP at 34 per cent, the Liberals at 21 per cent, and the Greens at 5 per cent.
“The industry has been under a lot of scrutiny,” Bozinoff says, adding his firm has upgraded its IVR calling capacity so they can call more than 100,000 cellphones and landlines a night to achieve 2,600 completed surveys. “We can set the proportion of cellphones,” he says, ensuring more younger people are contacted. But Bozinoff says that there is always the potential for a “rogue” or outlier poll.
Greg Lyle, managing director of Innovative Research Group, stresses it is also important to look at the bigger picture in public-opinion polling.
“There were a couple of pretty obvious outliers in this campaign, but the thing is, when we say ‘19 times out of 20,’ we do mean it, right?” Lyle says, referring to the few outlying polls that did not reflect what the majority of surveys were showing. “So it wouldn’t be real if there weren’t outliers,” he says.
Lyle, whose research is wellknown in political circles for probing beyond just the parties’ “horse-race” numbers, says his firm “did a lot of work looking at economic alienation.”
“What we’re more interested in is what’s going on — who’s moving, why they’re moving, what does this mean in terms of moving forward,” he says, noting Ford outperformed former PC leader Tim Hudak among some key demographic groups.
“Ford did a lot better than Hudak did with what we call ‘thrifty moderates’ — people on the centre-left who want to pay as you go.”
That could have led to more voters heading to the polls, Lyle adds. Indeed, 58 per cent of those eligible cast ballots in the election — up from 51 per cent in 2014 and 48 per cent in the 2011 campaign.
“Some level of turnout was due to the level of anger against the previous government, but I also think that another part of the turnout is that people — who felt in previous campaigns that there was really no one who was their voice — looked at Ford and said: ‘This guy gets me.’ ”
And all of the polls certainly showed that.