Tuesday 5 April 2011

Polls, Schmolls

There's been a lot of talk lately about the reliability of political polling. Well, there would be given the complete disjunct between the Contempt Party's record and campaign so far and polls seeming to show the country's apparent willingness to overlook all that.

A report today from StatsCan sheds some light.
In addition, more households are abandoning their traditional landline telephones in favour of wireless phones only. In 2010, 13% of households reported they used a cell phone exclusively, up from 8% in 2008.

This was particularly the case for young households. In 2010, 50% of households in the 18-to-34 age bracket were using only cell phones, up from 34% two years earlier.

Pollsters use landlines. So, 13% of Canadians (and those are 2010 numbers; the trend would indicate even more now) are not being surveyed at all. Even more importantly, half a pretty sizeable segment is missing too.

People may say, yeahbut that's the very segment that does not vote.

We'll just have to see about that.

But in the meantime, for me there's enough evidence to completely ignore ALL polls until May 2. That one I'll pay attention to.

1 comment:

The Mound of Sound said...

Hi Fern. Polls aren't particularly useful until about halfway through a campaign when the voting public has become engaged and their support firmed up. The books are full of contests where the early frontrunner faltered in mid-campaign. We knew Harper was ahead by a large margin going into this so it is anything but surprising that he would be leading the polls in the early weeks.

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