Do opinion polls have value?
Past election predictions wildly off
With the provincial election campaign underway, public opinion polls are already surfacing — and with them, concerns about their methodology, accuracy and value to the public after they failed miserably in previous votes.
Three years ago, not one poll available to the public accurately predicted the Progressive Conservatives would surge past the frontrunning Wildrose. The next year, in B. C., 10 polling companies failed to forecast the Liberal win over the NDP.
Are accurate polls a thing of the past, when everyone had a land line and answered calls?
“There’s no excuse, I think, for what happened in Alberta and British Columbia. That’s not even close to accurate, so there was something we need to learn about,” said Abacus Data CEO David Coletto.
“But even in more recent provincial elections in Ontario and Quebec, where the polls generally did OK, the assumption is always that we have to be dead- on accurate. Polls can’t always do that. If they do, it’s more luck than anything. They’re meant to be snapshots. There is error built in to it.”
Still, there is a huge divide in methodology, and for the public, that’s not always readily apparently when political parties are waving various numbers around.
On Wednesday, for example, the Wildrose was pointing to a Think HQ poll that found their party, the PCs and the NDP in a dead heat; another poll from Mainstreet Technologies being released Thursday is showing a similarly tight race. They follow on the heels of two polls last week, one by Mainstreet and the other by Insights West, that also both found the Wildrose and PCs were neck and neck.
The Insights West and Think HQ polls were from online panels; the Mainstreet Technologies ones were Interactive Voice Response polls — dubbed “demon diallers” — which are automated phone calls.
“There is no single methodology that works all the time,” said Return on Insight president Bruce Cameron.
He believes the future lies in a hybrid methodology combining live phone delivery and online recruitment of respondents that approaches the randomness of a phone sample. He said those hybrids are being developed in Canada.