The Polls, the Election Results and Trump

The most notable outcome of the 2020 U.S. election was that, as expected, Trump lost both the popular vote and the electoral college. However, the polls experienced significant errors, the nature of which is still being debated. Overall, it appears that polling understated support for Trump and the Republicans by about three or four points. It is also clear that there was a Republican anti-Trump vote (a group of Republican voters who were small 'c' conservatives that opposed Trump, but also supported Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives). There was also increased turnout from a pro-Trump constituency, many likely middle aged or older and voting for the first time. The results disappointed Democrats who expected more. However, the party seems to trail the Republicans when it comes to innovative campaign techniques and it made other mistakes in its congressional campaigning.

Polling Error

There appears to have been a general problem with the polling.  As the highly respected Pew Research Center noted: 

...the election was much closer than polls suggested in several battleground states (e.g., Wisconsin) and more decisive for Trump elsewhere (e.g., Ohio). ... it’s clear that national and many state estimates were not just off, but off in the same direction: They favored the Democratic candidate...Looking across the 12 battleground states from the upper Midwest (where many polls missed the mark) to the Sun Belt and Southwest (where many were stronger), polls overestimated the Democratic advantage by an average of about 4 percentage points. When looking at national polls, the Democratic overstatement will end up being similar, about 4 points...The fact that the polling errors were not random, and that they almost uniformly involved underestimates of Republican rather than Democratic performance, points to a systematic cause or set of causes. 

Although Nate Silver of the blog FiveThirtyEight called the miss "pretty normal by historical standards", he links those words to a blog post from Vox whose sub-headline is "The kind of people who answer polls are really weird, and it’s ruining polling" - hardly illustrative of the point he was trying to make.  The author of that post quotes a Democratic polling expert named David Shor who says of 2020, "the kind of people who answer polls are systematically different from the kind of people who refuse to answer polls — and that this has recently begun biasing the polls in a systematic way."

My view is that there was a systematic problem. It likely had more than one cause.  One possibility might be that the pandemic had a unique impact. Pew says: 

The once-in-a-generation coronavirus pandemic dramatically altered how people intended to vote, with Democrats disproportionately concerned about the virus and using early voting (either by mail or in person) and Republicans more likely to vote in person on Election Day itself. In such an unusual year – with so many people voting early for the first time and some states changing their procedures – it’s possible that some Democrats who thought they had, or would, cast a ballot did not successfully do so. A related point is that Trump and the Republican Party conducted a more traditional get-out-the-vote effort in the campaign’s final weeks, with large rallies and door-to-door canvassing. These may have further confounded likely voter models.

While this argument does have merit Pew also suggests another explanation that makes sense to me:

The overall share of Republicans in survey samples was roughly correct, but the samples underrepresented the most hard-core Trump supporters in the party. One possible corollary of this theory is that Republicans’ widespread lack of trust in institutions like the news media – which sponsors a great deal of polling – led some people to not want to participate in polls.

The pronounced alienation of some parts of the population from institutions may be a broader phenomenon than we have appreciated. I had noted to myself that in Canada the Conservatives were sometimes underestimated in Canadian polls, especially in Alberta. I double checked for this post, and confirmed that an average of the closing polls in Alberta in the 2019 federal election underestimated the party's actual vote share in the election by about ten points, well outside any margin of error.  There have also been other collective poll misses, particularly in the BC election in 2013, where again it was the political right that was under-estimated. The Alberta miss was in the most small 'c' conservative province in Canada, one with a history of rural right of centre populism.  It is possible that normal polling is undercounting rural conservatives. 

Rural Resentment

American political scientist Kathy Cramer investigated rural resentment in Wisconsin before the Trump era, producing a book aimed at explaining support for a conservative Trump-like Republican Governor named Scott Walker.  She did so by travelling all over the state joining coffee klatches, talking and listening to the participants, a different way of measuring public opinion.  Her analysis is important to understanding attitudes to Trump and indirectly what happened in this year's election.  Here is an edited version of what she found, as summarized by an observer to a lecture she gave:

Rural consciousness is identifying as a rural person... and a strong perception of distributive injustice that disfavors you and your identity. Cramer notes that this ... comprises resentment toward: cities and city people, elites (government, financial, cultural), people of color, and partisan polarization. "(This) ...makes rural consciousness a fertile ground for populism. Cramer defines populism here as essentially, “people are good and government is bad.”

Rural folks explain, “Our hard-earned taxpayer dollars are going to people who do not deserve them.” They thoroughly believe that others don’t work as hard as they do. And by hard work they mean, “when you have to shower after work, not before it.” And when Cramer followed up with the groups after the book came out, they agreed that they were resentful.

There is also a sense of loss. That these people’s communities and their standard of living have been taken away—that their status is threatened.  

... (T)here is a belief that government is urban and distant. Even if workers are local, the decisions they follow are from the city to the rural area. They believe the government is not really working for them.... 

Cramer is still reflecting on how Donald Trump’s campaign activated rural consciousness. In contrast to Scott Walker’s assault on public employees, Donald Trump pointed to immigrants, Muslims, and women as undeserving groups. ... 

Importantly, when she asks these rural folks what they hope will change with the new administration, they say they don’t expect anything to change. They set a very low bar. And it’s clear to her, that their criteria for Trump’s success is not anything like liberals criteria. They don’t believe he is going to solve their problems.... 

This latter point is important.  It explains why, despite Trump's manifest incompetence and failure to improve the lives of his supporters, what ends up mattering to them are the symbolic steps he takes, as they don't actually believe he can accomplish anything meaningful for them.

Turnout

Democrats voted by mail in large numbers because of fear of the pandemic, but precisely because they feared the pandemic, I suspect it is likely a significant number of Democratic voters did not show up in person to vote on election day. Given that turnout was up significantly it is extremely difficult to calculate the exact dimensions of this, although we may see efforts to do so in the months ahead. I want to emphasize that there could both be a large increase in turnout overall of Democratic votes because of intense anti-Trump feelings, while simultaneously there could have been a lower than anticipated turnout of in person Democratic votes on election day, because of pandemic fears. Republicans did not share fear of the virus nearly as much as Democrats, because of the absurd, but widely believed propaganda, peddled by the right. For example, watch this CNN interview with a nurse from a small town in South Dakota who treated patients who clearly thought the virus was a hoax, and desperately wanted to believe their COVID-19 was some other illness.

There were some outcomes in particular areas that surprised the campaigns. For example, in Florida in Miami-Dade county the Democrats strongly underperformed among Hispanics, something that also showed up elsewhere such as Orange County in California. Trump made some small gains among blacks. There are likely some straightforward explanations for this. Trump campaigned on "reopening the economy" in the face of the growing coronavirus.  Some of the working class, which is heavily black and Hispanic and suffering from unemployment because of the pandemic, may have been susceptible to such an appeal. In addition, the Republicans were willing to do door to door campaigning, which Democrats, worried about the virus, avoided. Republicans have also been adopting innovative digital campaign techniques unmatched by the Democrats. 

Digital Campaigning

The Republicans effectively used targeted digital voting via social media, such as Youtube, Twitter and Facebook to persuade certain voters to support them. It helps explain what happened in places such as Miami-Dade and Texas. Read the comments of political scientist Rachel Bitecofer delivered on a post-election panel discussion sponsored by Oxford University: (I have edited these remarks but you can hear the original on Youtube at about the 56:30 mark)

"I started talking about ... their micro-target efforts and like what they were doing with Latino voters way way way back in 2018 about how the um you know Republicans. It was going to be heavily reliant on digital targeting through Youtube, Facebook, targeting voters of color, young men Latino and black young men with these micro-targeted ads. It relies on the assumption that these people don't know anything about politics, they know nothing, they're a clean slate, and so therefore it doesn't matter in if in reality Donald Trump is a racist, the GOP platform is the most racially hostile it's been ever, these things don't matter if you have a voter that knows nothing and you come in and you start talking to them about the 1994 crime bill [Biden supported it and it has been deemed to have targeted blacks] and you make that the salient issue. You'll suddenly start hearing talking points coming out of the communities of color and that is that Democrats take black voters for granted.... You could hear this on MSNBC, they were interviewing some black voters in Atlanta, what is the main thing they are considering... 'I still haven't come in all the way in for Biden because I'm really upset about that crime bill'... She is thinking about the crime bill... They're not thinking about Donald Trump's contemporaneous record on race."

On the same panel. Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project commented (around 1;02:30):  "We had guys trawling through the thousands and thousands of ad variants they ran on Facebook to pick out these different things and you could have seen people living next door to each other, and in one house they were getting the message that scary brown people are coming to kill you, and the house next door would be Joe Biden puts brown people in jail and that that, that, that ability of Facebook to profoundly manipulate voter behavior is the most unappreciated aspect of the last 10 years of our campaigns."

The Democrats appear to be no match for the Republicans when it comes to these internet based campaign techniques. 

While it is clear from 2020 that the polls have serious problems, particularly from what is called partisan non-reponse (i.e. conservative Republicans aren't picking up the phone), but there are still some pollsters who did well in the 2020 election. Ann Selzer is an Iowa based pollster who has an established reputation for accuracy.  Her poll of Iowa released just before the 2020 election was bang on accurate, despite drawing criticism from others who believed in a Democratic blue wave at the time. 

I noted earlier the increased turnout of pro-Trump voters, many likely voting for the first time. It is hard to gauge the size of this group, but in aggregate Trump did win over eleven million more votes than in 2016.  For them Trump is a visionary, charismatic (and deeply racist) leader. They would have mostly voted the straight Republican ticket meaning some of the Republican down ballot strength is attributable to this factor. We don't know if they will be there in future elections.

I suspect both the pandemic and the Trump factor may make 2020 unique. Vaccines are being produced and Trump, despite his current rhetoric, may not be a factor in future U.S. elections. For now, although Trump is gone, the Democrats have weak support in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the country remains polarized.  This means the United States likely still faces a difficult future.

Ballot Measures

One final note: There were some progressive measures adopted in state referendums. In Florida, while supporting Trump, the state also voted for a $15 per hour minimum wage. In the ruby red state of Oklahoma, which just voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, a referendum held last summer, voted narrowly to approve an expansion of Medicaid, "a public health insurance program for the poor, with states splitting the cost with the federal government." 

U.S. Election - TC's Final Call

 Three Possible Outcomes

The U.S. election is imminent. This post represents my final assessment.

Recently anti-Trump Republican Bill Kristol laid out three election scenarios as alternate Wednesday, November 4th headlines:

1. “Trump loses presidency as Midwest flips; GOP holds Senate.”

2. “Trump defeated by big margin; election called early as Florida and North Carolina go to Biden; Democrats win Senate.”

3. “Biden wins by double digits in popular vote; rout extends to victory in Texas; Democrats control Senate easily.”

My own gut reaction is that the most likely scenario is number two with the distinct possibility the scenario will be number three. The first scenario seems the least likely as a Democratic takeover of the Senate seems highly likely; indeed a big blue wave could happen.  Trump can only win by coming from behind in the polls in a large number of states where he now trails. The only scenario for a Trump victory appears to be that he holds most of the states he won last time. Among the three midwestern states that he won for the Republicans for the first time in many years in 2016, he can afford to lose Wisconsin and Michigan where he trails significantly, but not Pennsylvania, where he is behind but by a smaller margin.  

However, the poll averages reported on the websites Fivethirtyeight and Real Clear Politics, as well as the New York Times, suggest that, in addition to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump is behind (sometimes narrowly) in the following jurisdictions he won in 2016: Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Nebraska 2nd Congressional District, and the Maine 2nd Congressional District. Overall, the polls would have to be more wrong than in 2016 for Trump to win. There is a narrow path where Trump overcomes his deficits in the southern states plus the one in Pennsylvania. On the other side of the ledger he holds only quite narrow leads in three states he won in 2016: Iowa, Ohio and Texas. He must win them all to have a chance.

Most analysts are skeptical of a 'shy' or 'hidden' Trump Voter effect. Here is political scientist Rachel Bitecofer;

"... I am skeptical of the “hidden Trump voter” thesis. Of course, one can find hidden Trump voters just as surely you can find secret Biden voters running around ruby red America. But as with “disaffected” Republicans defecting to vote for Biden, like the ones who have joined groups like Biden Republicans and who are donating money to The Lincoln Project, what we’re primarily concerned with is quantitative evidence of them at the mass level.

One way to test for hidden Trump voters is to compare Trump’s support between live interview polls and anonymous polls like those done by YouGov, which are anonymous and online - where no one can judge you. People have no need to hide from online or automated polls. But like in 2016, there is no difference in Trump’s level of support via these two data collection methods and often, Trump overperforms on live telephone interviews, which really undercuts the “hidden voter” hypothesis."

After the polling misses of 2016, primarily state polls as the national polls were close, pollsters examined what went wrong. Mainly, they concluded, they under-estimated non-college educated white voters, in part because they were either under-sampled or underweighted. They have made corrections to avoid that this time and are highly conscious of the earlier miss. However, perhaps they are now missing in the other direction, under-estimating the Biden vote. 

After considering all the polling data plus my impressions this is the electoral map I expect (the grades of blue and red indicate how close the results should be):

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

You can see other scenarios at the 270 to win website including which states are considered toss-ups.  The consensus forecast, which includes a number of states considered toss-ups, has Biden winning at least 290 electoral votes, enough to win the election.

On election night if Biden wins Florida, which counts early, the prospects of a Biden victory become so high that the fact that some states won't be finished their count the same night will likely not prevent the networks from making a call, particularly if another state such as Arizona or North Carolina goes for Biden. The advance and mail-in vote may be counted slowly in a number of states including the crucial three in the midwest. Several of recent elections have not been called before midnight on election day but this one may.  

A Tale of Two Provincial Elections: Saskatchewan and BC

Saskatchewan: A Long Term Shift to the Right?

There will be provincial elections held imminently in two western provinces, British Columbia on Saturday October 24, followed by Saskatchewan on Monday October 26. Historically, the two jurisdictions have been of great importance to the New Democratic Party. Saskatchewan was home to the breakthrough election of 1944 that brought Tommy Douglas to office and would eventually produce Canada's first public health care plans. 

Map of 1944 Saskatchewan Election

The CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) and NDP have held office for 47 of the 76 years since that win in 1944, while three parties with different names but all representing the political right have held office for just 29 of those years. However, over the past several elections support for the NDP has been steadily declining while the conservative Saskatchewan party has won overwhelming majorities of the constituencies in the Saskatchwan legislature. 

The polls in the current campaign so far suggest that while the NDP can expect some improvement in vote share, and could pick up some seats, the Saskatchewan Party remains headed for an a big victory. Originally the CCF represented agrarian socialism (as the map suggests) but the party soon shifted to the cities. 

A new Saskatchewan Party win would mean that Saskatchewan would be headed for 17 consecutive years of small 'c' conservative governance, far exceeding the length of previous right-wing regimes. It has been a complicated multi factor process but in part it reflects the consolidation of the conservative support in almost all of rural agricultural Saskatchewan except the far north, and Saskatchewan's shift to becoming an oil province (probably a sunset industry later in this century) and conscious of its status as such - it is among the provinces vigourously challenging the federal carbon tax. Conservative parties also hold sway in rural parts of Canada elsewhere.

Results of federal elections in Saskatchewan have paralleled the provincial results, with the Conservatives under the prevous Saskatchewan-based leader Andrew Scheer winning a share of votes and seats similar to Alberta in last year's federal election. 

The NDP may well turn a corner upward in this election but, given that all governments accumulate grievances, that is to be expected. However, the Saskatchewan of Dream No Little Dreams (a book I highly recommend) seems in the distant past. Indeed it seems more likely at the moment that we will see a new NDP government in Alberta before we see one in Saskatchewan.

British Columbia: Becoming a Canadian California?

About fifty years ago a book chapter on British Columbia was sub-titled The Politics of Class Conflict. BC's history is of an economy based on natural resources such as mining and fisheries that has been characterized by strong class-based conflicts between strong unions and antagonistic employers. The unions have supported political parties on the left expressing their interests. 

The old CCF never won office in BC - it was not until 1972 that the NDP won office for a single term. However, the political right was sufficiently terrified of the electoral prospects of the left to have formed a coalition government of the Liberals and Conservatives in the 1940s to keep them from winning. The Social Credit governments that followed were that same coalition reconstituted along slightly different lines. The most recent expression of the same coalition can be found in the B.C. Liberal Party governments that followed the defeat of the first two term NDP government, albeit winning elections under two different leaders (Mike Harcourt in 1991 and Glen Clark in 1996). Notably, although Glen Clark lead the NDP to victory in 1996, the party actually won a smaller share of the popular vote than the BC Liberals.

While the NDP has had limited success in BC compared to Saskatchewan, the 21st century is providing brighter prospects for the party. In part the older class-based politics has given way to a politics that reflects the multiple and overlapping strains of modern political culture, marrying traditional concerns about social and economic inequality to emerging issues like climate change and the demands for recognition and respect for the range of peoples that compose our increasingly diverse society. While these social trends matter enormously, one can never underestimate the importance of leadership.

John Horgan

The NDP in BC is poised to win the election and form a second consecutive government under the same leader for the first time on Saturday night. A key reason for this is that the BC NDP has one of the most talented political leaders on this continent in the person of John Horgan. I am increasingly of view that when it comes to politics experience matters most when it comes to picking leaders (we have just had a demonstration in the New Brunswick election of what happens when a party chooses a politically inexperienced neophyte as leader). Horgan brought to the job not just years of direct political experience dating from his first election in 2005, but also deep experience working as both a political advisor and public servant in the BC NDP governments of the 1990s. The people I know in B.C. who have had dealings with him have the utmost respect for him.

The BC NDP continue to lead the opposition Liberals and the Green Party in opinion polls: based on the latest numbers I have them winning at least 52 seats in the 87 seat legislature. Beyond Saturday's result we can see that BC has a coastal politics similar to the US states of Washington, Oregon and California, a politics that trends to the left. I wrote about this in 2017 when I said:

The blue state-red state trend in the U.S. is of relatively recent vintage (until the mid-nineties Republicans were strong in California), but the trend to more left of centre views (and growing green consciousness) is clearly characteristic of the coasts in both places. Can it be too many more years before the trends evident south of the border become typical of B.C.?

In contrast, the politics of the plains province of Saskatchewan are beginng to appear similar to American states directly to its south. The last election in BC produced a close overall result between the BC Liberals and the NDP but the Greens produced a stronger showing than before. There was a dramatic increase in the combined NDP-Green vote from the prior election in 2013. The Green Party do have roots in both left wing and more conservative politics, but in BC overall they lean much more left. That jump in the combined vote from 2013 to 2017 and continuing in 2020 is something we should expect to be a theme of politics in the 21st century. As for Saskatchewan, while the analogy is far from perfect, their US neighbour North Dakota, now a highly conservative Trump voting state, was once ruled by the Non-Partisan League, a left of centre radical agrarian politcal formation that captured the state's Republican Party.

On this blog I normally write about politics but today is Canada Day

On July 1, 1945 - 75 years ago today - an event took place in Ottawa that was of critical importance to my family. Both my mother and father moved to Ottawa in the spring of 1945, unbeknownst to each other.

Clarence Barber

Barbara Patchet

That spring my mother graduated from the University of Toronto at a ceremony where, as she puts it, "At our June graduation George Drew, the Conservative premier of Ontario spoke and all our class booed. We felt so superior."

Almost right away she headed for Ottawa expecting a job to be waiting for her. Many of the details that follow come from the life writing stories my mother wrote in during her retirement. She completed some 250 of them between ages of 79 and 89. She was born in Toronto in 1923 and named Barbara Patchet at birth. She picks up the story:

"In June, l945 having just graduated in sociology from the University of Toronto I headed to Ottawa by train having been recommended by my professor for a job in the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (DBS). I traveled with a university acquaintance named Betty who was going to work in the new National Incomes Branch.

I headed down to DBS, found my prospective employer out of town, and ended up as a clerical assistant to a Civil Service Commissioner. While I cannot remember precisely what my duties were as assistant to the Civil Service Commissioner I do remember being very impressed with the curriculum vitae of the man who was to be my future husband.  He had all A’s and such extravagant praise.

Canoeing 1946

Then I met him briefly in the hallway of DBS when I went to visit Betty. A few days later on July 1st, a national holiday, I went for lunch in a restaurant near my room (Bank and Fifth). It was quite empty but there in a corner I spotted Clarence and had no hesitation in saying, “ Do you mind if I eat with you? I hate to eat alone”

After lunch we decided to go canoeing out at Hog’s Back on the Ottawa River.  He too lived in a room and we ended up eating our dinners together. At our wedding two years later he ended up in responding to the toast to the bride that he did not have to eat alone anymore. 

Because Clarence and I both lived in rooms, we fell into the habit of eating dinner together. We went bicycling or walking and to celebrate in any way we went to a better restaurant, a movie or dancing at the Chateau grill. I loved Ottawa because it was small, picturesque and there was a French joie de vivre compared to Toronto. Moreover, I was in love.

Rideau Street Ottawa in the 40s

Our backgrounds were very different. My father was a business man, secretary treasurer of Saturday Night magazine. Clarence came from a Saskatchewan farm, growing up during the depression, worked on the farm following high school, while taking his first university year extramurally. After a B.A. from the University of Saskatchean, scholarships took him to American universities for his M.A. and PhD (in economics). In l943 he returned to Canada to join the RCAF." (I wrote a longer description of my father's biography in 2017 here: https://tcnorris.blogspot.com/2017/05/clarence-lyle-barber.html)

He received an early release from the military having been recruited to work for DBS as part of a team developing Canada's national income accounts. That was why he found himself in Ottawa that spring renting a room and eating many of his meals in simple cafeteria style restaurants, quite common in the era. While he was happy to work at DBS in postwar Ottawa, his career aspirations were to teach economics at a university.

My parents enjoyed their three years in Ottawa - taking time out to get married in Toronto in May 1947 - as the photos below illustrate, taking advantage of what it had to offer including the nearby lakes and hills of Quebec.

Babs & Clarence 1946

Babs at Lac Blue Sea, Quebec

Babs & Clarence Winter 1945-46

My mother picks up the story again:

When Clarence turned down an offer to teach at the University of Pittsburgh in 1946,  I asked him what he wanted to do and his answer amazed me “I think I have an original contribution to make to Canadian economics” This confidence in self was staggering to me.

After a small wedding in Toronto we spent our savings on a honeymoon, a week in Boston, a week in Cape Cod, and ended up in Quebec City. There, we saw some of our colleagues who were attending the Learned Societies . 

After a seemingly idyllic three years, they moved to Hamilton, shortly after my birth, where my father taught economics for a year. In 1949 they moved on to Winnipeg.

As Yogi said it ain't over 'til its over but...

For four years Donald Trump has maintained a level of support that, beyond being greater than someone so incompetent deserves, actually had left him competitive for re-election despite trailing. However, the last few months featuring COVID-19, the economic collapse and Black Lives Matter protests have now so reduced his support in both national and state polls such that his re-election prospects are, for the moment, dead.

He is not just behind, he is way behind. As recently as mid-May Trump was just over 4 points behind in the Real Clear Politics National Average. Now he is 8.5 points back. If I project the results of a four point victory compared to eight and a half points using the model that I normally only deploy to analyze Canadian politics, it is the difference between Biden winning with about 308 electoral votes including several close states (it takes 270 to win), and 356 electoral college votes, a landslide, where the swing states from 2016 vote decisively Democratic. This estimate is matched by the other key politics and polling website: the FiveThirtyEight blog of Nate Silver, which has Biden ahead of Trump by nine points and he says Biden is ahead in states worth 368 electoral college votes.

There is a weekly podcast featuring key Obama advisor David Axelrod and Republican consultant Mike Murphy (he ran Jeb Bush's campaign). In their podcast released on June 17 Murphy commented on the current polls (about the 23 minute mark):

Trump was in trouble in the swing states before coronavirus. I thought he was heading toward losing, but he was in the race. Then the wrong track when people say in polling 'things have gone to hell' has skyrocketed, and the economic argument has evaporated at least right now, so now he's in trouble in the states he ought to get pretty much for free like Iowa. Now my guess is that in the end he'll be able to crawl to a victory or two but it's (Iowa) in play no doubt about it. Over at campaign headquarters right now - memo to staff -  'we put this guy in ads with the current message and it gets worse'.... so this is the total nightmare.

Here is approximately what I think an 8.5 or 9 point Biden victory would look like:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Anyone know what this thing is?

In addition to the factors cited above Trump's own efforts have backfired. The Bible waving photo op that involved forcibly clearing out protestors has significantly harmed him. I thought it looked both foolish and seriously weird. It suggested just by the way he held the book up that he didn't take the Bible seriously at all. The public noticed. In Michigan it caused a "sharp dive in the polls". Trump went from a 12 point deficit to a 16 point deficit in a state that was crucial to his victory in 2016 precisely because of this authoritarian but ham-fisted manoeuvre.

To recover would require a combination of both strong economic growth plus a decreasing incidence of the coronavirus. Trump's reputation as a good economic manager, which he doesn't deserve, has held up  relatively strongly. However, for the economy to recover the U.S. has to get the virus under control. If the economy doesn't recover strongly there will come a time when his reputation suffers. The situation is better than it was but as the New York Times puts it:

As states move to partly reopen their economies, thousands of new cases are still being identified each day and true normalcy remains a distant vision.

If true normalcy is a distant vision both economically and in terms of the nation's and the world's health, it is extremely difficult to see what might help Trump stage a comeback. The protests led by Black Lives Matter might have been thought to allow Trump to make a law and order appeal as Nixon did in 1968 but it hasn't worked out that way. As Robert Gibbs (at one time Obama's press secretary) put it on another podcast (12:32 mark), "I think its important for that 1968 analogy, he's (Trump) not playing the Nixon character in 1968, he is playing very clearly George Wallace and quite frankly Nixon had the ability to do what he needed to do in that election by playing off of both candidates - at this point David Axerod jumps in - Yeah he triangulated. Wallace did the heavy lifting and scare mongering and Nixon was able to present Wallace as another face of disorder."

This time the candidate who offers a vision of renewed stability, calm and order is Joe Biden. Yes, it is true that a week is a long time, perhaps an eternity, in politics. However, sometimes the outcome of an election becomes a certainty well ahead of the actual date. It certainly looks like that is the way we are headed now.

The 1950 Red River Flood: 70th Anniversary

Seventy years ago this week the Red River flood started. It had a huge impact on our family. Later my father was a part of the process that led to the building of the floodway

The 1950 Flood: My Family's Experience

My parents, Clarence Barber and wife Babs, moved into a new house in Wildwood Park in the fall of 1949. My father came to Winnipeg take up a teaching post in economics at the University of Manitoba (neither parent had ever lived in Winnipeg before moving) only to be flooded out in the spring of 1950. My mother had two small children including me, six weeks shy of being two and my brother Steve then a five-month old baby. For my mother, the experience of the flood (as for many others) was truly horrific.

In her eighties she took a life-writing class in Oak Bay B.C. eventually penning over 250 essays about her life. This (slightly edited) essay conveys how for many residents caught up in those events of 70 years ago, it was a dark and stressful time.

My father, around the time the family left Wildwood Park for a house on Kingsway in Crescentwood, was hired to conduct economic studies for the Manitoba Royal Commission on Flood Cost Benefit. This was the commission that recommended the construction of the Red River Floodway. The floodway is now hailed as an unmitigated success, the saviour of lives and property in Manitoba, an outstanding example of the importance of the right infrastructure investments. I will discuss this more below but first my family's personal story of the flood written by my mother who passed away three years ago in May 2017. She wrote it in 2011 when another flood threatened.

------------------------------------------------

I see on TV that once again the Red River threatens to overflow its banks and flood the land. Memories of May 1950, rush back to haunt me.

On May 5, 1950, the day before we evacuated our new home (in Wildwood Park) it was my husband’s 33rd birthday. I had made him a chocolate cake.

After a tense dinner Clarence went back to continue help filling sandbags and hauling them to the dike in a futile attempt to hold back the Red River. The remainder of the cake went out to feed the neighbours, all working on the dike.

With 2 babies in diapers I had been busy with the laundry since I had to dry them on a wooden rack in the basement.  I was also busy with the myriad tasks of a housewife and mother. The last thing in the world I wanted was to leave my little house and money was scarce.

Seeing the large puddle on South Drive which bordered the river I commented on it to Clarence who told me it was not a puddle but the river. We even had close neighbours, both architects who were living nearby in one story houses of their own design.

The day of departure was an appalling nightmare. Leaden skies, rain pouring down, children confined to house and crying. What could we do?

One of Clarence’s colleagues who had agreed to shelter us in the event of a flood phoned the morning of May 6 to say the whole family had come down with the flu and it was no place to bring a baby. Another colleague phoned and offered us shelter.

A wailing siren warned us all to leave. An Ottawa friend phoned volunteering to come and drive us to the colleague’s house. She had heard about the evacuation. Anna had been a senior person in Health and Welfare where I had worked before marriage.

My first thought was what the children would need. Formula was made, food for Paul, diapers both dry and damp, clothes for the children and oh yes, a few clothes for me. I resembled a poor immigrant, scarf over hair, laden with bags and babies as I went out in the rain. But I did evacuate in style in a Cadillac.

Sirens wailing, headlights on at the shopping centre and trucks laden with sand roaring through the streets and a crying baby in my arms.

Anna quickly sized up my refuge and knew there was not enough room for us there. That night I cannot recall at all.

The next day Anna phoned and told me I was going to her sister’s house which had more room. I was very grateful but my heart sank when I saw the lovely carpet and elegant surroundings. Her sister had cooked us a wonderful roast beef dinner with a remarkably good apple pie. The baby still cried although he had been such a happy baby.

I called the doctor and realizing my state, she told me to turn the baby over to my husband and take a walk around the block. When I returned there was a sedative for me to take.

This I did, but I also phoned my parents in Toronto to ask for refuge. Instead my father offered us money not to come.

Because there were forecasts of more rain, which could put much of the city under water, residents were being asked to leave. I had to flee Winnipeg, leaving my husband behind to save our furniture. I flew home to Toronto on May 10th, my third wedding anniversary, wearing my “going away suit and coat”. I was accompanied by a 5-year old girl, daughter of the head of the economics department, my 5-month old baby and the 23-month-old son.

323 Wildwood Park during 1950 Flood
Photo taken by Clarence Barber

Trans Canada Airlines added an extra stewardess to take care of the baby (the plane was a North Star) and shortly after take-off she came to me because he was crying and she did not know what to do. Neither did I.

My mother’s first words were “Aren’t you glad it was not fire!” That thought had never occurred to me.

How happy I was to return 6 weeks later and live in 2 rooms upstairs while the house repairs went on for the next few months. Paul slept in the crib while the baby was in his carriage downstairs.

Before the house flooded Clarence and a neighbour had helped each other by building a ramp on the stairs and slid each other’s furniture up to the second floor. The fridge was on the landing, the bathroom was fortunately on the second floor and I cooked on a 2-burner stove in our bedroom.

The houses in our subdivision were repaired by the builder with several teams. The first came and cleaned out the mud followed by others who created new walls and floors. Shortly before Christmas we were back downstairs. A nightmare, never to be forgotten.

My husband, not knowing what repairs would cost had painstakingly taken up each of the oak floor boards. They eventually got moved to our second home – a big, old house in a higher part of the city. My architect son Steve, that crying 5 month old baby fashioned the boards into a dining room table which is still being used.

323 Wildwood Park in 2009

So, it seemed only just that in l956 Clarence was appointed to conduct economic research for a Provincial Royal Commission to investigate flood prevention on the Red River. The eventual result was the building of the Winnipeg Floodway. Clarence liked to boast later that it was the only commission on which he served that had every recommendation carried out.

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THE RED RIVER FLOODWAY

The Commission's Innovative Work

As noted in my mother's essay my father was on the staff of the Manitoba Royal Commission on Flood Cost Benefit.  It was appointed in December 1956 following engineering studies that were clear that the only effective way in the long run was to build a floodway, a 26 mile (42 km) ditch around the east side of Winnipeg that then returned the diverted flood waters to the lower Red River near where it flows into Lake Winnipeg.

Appointed in December 1956 the commission was historically significant and was the subject of a published study by historian J.M. Bumsted who noted:

The Royal Commission on Flood Cost Benefit made recommendations that determined Manitoba’s basic policy on flood mitigation to the present day. In many respects, of course, Manitoba has gone farther in terms of structural protection against flooding than any other jurisdiction in the world. The commission’s report also represented, moreover, the first large-scale cost-benefit analysis ever done in Canada, and pioneered in introducing a new approach and methodology into planning and public policy.

He later notes that the key innovation in the study (that came from my father) was the concept of taking loss of income into account in assessing the benefits that would accrue from flood protection:

Two innovative aspects of the damages calculations were the categories of loss of income and extra costs.... they were typically neglected by many cost-benefit studies of the time. The Manitoba economists estimated the level of income produced and then evaluated the proportion of that lost at different stages of flooding.... As for extra costs, the commission estimated for four kinds of extra costs, ranging from evacuation expenses to extra food costs because of displacement to extra labor costs in flooded homes and additional transportation costs.... The commission's report argued that most of the cost estimates were on the conservative side, which was almost certainly correct.

Bumsted  concludes:

Almost unique among royal commissions either federal or provincial, all of its major recommendations were eventually implemented in virtually the form in which it had presented them. Moreover, its analysis shaped the flood mitigation agenda of Manitoba for more than a generation; in 1997, the province still had not drawn free of the conclusions and opinions of this 1958 report. Perhaps equally important, the pioneering work of Clarence Barber represented a real breakthrough for Canadian social science in the 1950s... the 1958 Royal Commission on Flood Cost Benefit was a pioneering effort at applied cost benefit analysis, which had enormous impact upon the province of Manitoba.

Getting the Floodway Built

Although the technical studies were clear in terms of their conclusion that there ought to be a floodway (and some smaller flood control projects), because the proposed projects were so expensive it wasn't necessarily a given that the floodway would get built and when. The government of Douglas Campbell was extremely fiscally cautious and conservative and only appointed the commission under considerable pressure. In fact as Bumsted notes:

Some observers thought him the tightest penny-pincher in the history of a relatively poor province. ... His response to the Manitoba Flood of 1950 was cautious and heavily criticized at the time for its failure to act in advance of federal assistance and its unwillingness to insist on more support from Ottawa.

Duff Roblin

The commission was appointed in 1956 following upon a near flood that spring, plus sustained pressure from Winnipeg business and the daily newspapers. In early May says Bumsted, "the Winnipeg Tribune published a front-page editorial on flooding. The government had begun warning of flooding in late February, but it would have been better if “proper long term precautions” had been taken. The newspaper began leading a chorus of demands for a cost-benefit analysis of the flood protection measures...."

Campbell's slowness to act meant that the report would be delivered to a new government in 1958, the minority administration of Duff Roblin, a more progressive and activist administration that championed the floodway.

As a 2001 article on "Duff''s Ditch" put it:

The project was championed by Dufferin (Duff) Roblin, the Leader of the Opposition and head of the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party, but it was vehemently denounced by opponents as a monumental, and potentially ruinous, waste of money. Indeed, the projected Red River Floodway was derisively referred to as “Duff”s Folly” and “Duff’s Ditch”, and decried as “approximating the building of the pyramids of Egypt in terms of usefulness.” The construction of the floodway and Assiniboine River works, would entail a capital cost of over $72 million, amortized over fifty years at 4% interest, at a time when the province had a population of only 900,000 and an annual net provincial revenue of about $74 million.

Roblin's vital role in getting the floodway built is a matter of record. What is not known is something my father related to me about the proceedings within the commission. There was one strong dissenter within the commission named Jack McDowell (who did file a formal dissent from the commission's conclusions). In the end although the other commissioners endorsed the report and its conclusions McDowell kept up a vociferous opposition to the floodway at all the meetings of the commission arguing absurdly that the floodway was unnecessary; all one had to do was clean up the river south of the city of junk that had been tossed in - I remember my father mentioning old rubber boots and junked cars. However, another commissioner, Culver Riley, a leading Winnipeg businessman, would then refocus the discussion on the basic facts, among them that the engineers had clearly recommended that only the floodway would provide reliable flood protection.

PM John Diefenbaker and Premier Duff Roblin

Even with Roblin's strong commitment to the floodway and getting it done as quickly as possible, Manitoba could not possibly finance such a large project on its own. Roblin launched negotiations with the then government of John Diefenbaker on a cost sharing agreement to finance the floodway construction. The negotiations were tough and protracted. I once had the opportunity to view some of the correspondence on the issue the Manitoba and federal governments exchanged during this period.

The federal government supported the floodway in principle, but wanted to go over the project budget in absolutely minute detail. The letters (and notes from phone calls) conveyed the flavour of one order of government pushing the other to assume as great a share of the costs as possible and vice versa. Worried about precedent, and knowing they were going to pay more than half, the federal government looked extremely carefully at every item, trying to minimize their exposure. They agreed, for example, they would pay 59.1% for item X but only 51.3% for item Y. 

The federal government had everything to gain from a floodway as they were on the hook for a significant percentage of compensation to flood victims and for damaged infrastructure. The 1950 flood cost $22 million in aid to victims and another $126 million in physical damages. (Note: my parents did not know when they were carrying out repairs to their house whether there would be any compensation; that came later).

The federal government agreed in principle to pay for a significant percentage of the floodway costs but were slow to come to a final agreement (in the end they paid 58.5% of the cost). In 1962 the Roblin government felt it could wait no longer and brought in legislation so that construction could commence, which it did in October of that year. It was among the largest construction projects ever undertaken in Canada. For example, "At the time, excavation of the floodway channel was the second largest earth moving project in the world (second only to the Panama Canal and larger than the Suez Canal project).   The floodway was completed in 1968 and went into operation.

Floodway where water is diverted from Red River

No sooner was the Red River Floodway completed than it proved of even greater benefit  than anticipated. The decade after 1968 saw a trend toward an increased frequency and severity of flooding with the mean annual discharge of both the Red and Assiniboine rivers exceeding, by 80% and 60% respectively, that of the period between 1915 and 1968. In 1969, 1970, 1974, and 1979, substantial flooding was experienced in the upper Red River Valley south of Winnipeg, costing millions of dollars in damage; yet Winnipeg escaped virtually unscathed with the Red River Floodway in operation. ....in the spring of 1979, the Red River Floodway proved beyond dispute its critical value in protecting the city from potentially severe inundations. In both years (1974 &1979) the volume of floodwaters approximated the 1950 flood, and would have devastated Winnipeg if not diverted by the flood control systems... Moreover, as of 1987 it was reported that the floodway had been put in operation 14 times in the first 19 years of its existence to control threatening flood waters, and had saved a cumulative total of $1 billion in flood damage costs within Winnipeg.

In 1997 came the largest flood seen on the Red River since the 19th century. It taxed the capacity of the floodway almost to its limit. Subsequently, a new project was initiated to expand the original floodway to a handle a much larger inundation, defined as a "once in 700-year flood".

The Importance of Infrastructure

The immense costs avoided by building the floodway illustrate that having the right infrastructure is of immense value to a community and a regional economy. This is not true of every project; Montreal's Olympic Stadium is an example of extraordinarily wasteful spending on infrastructure and there are numerous others. However, for essential purposes such as flood control or public transportation the right infrastructure spending is essential. It can also provide needed stimulus to a sagging national economy.  The deep downturn occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to address the looming climate crisis may once again highlight of the importance of capital expenditure on infrastructure.

Rachel the political forecasting revolutionary

A commonly held belief on ideology in politics is that it can be distinguished by its placement on a spectrum. This spectrum came originally from a seating arrangement in the French National Assembly at the time of the French Revolution when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president's right and supporters of the revolution to his left. It evolved over time becoming firmly established as a convention by early in the 20th century, with multiple gradations from right to left.

Flowing from that, an often unstated assumption of much political analysis is that movement takes places in the centre of the spectrum. To achieve political gains it follows one must persuade centre-right or centre-left voters to move a little in the opposite direction in order to make gains. This view of politics is central to much analysis of American politics, especially inside the Washington D.C. beltway, but it is being contested by an outsider.

Rachel Bitecofer

Little known until recently, Rachel Bitecofer, a Virginia based political scientist, has challenged this perspective on how American politics works.  As a profile of her in Politico put it: "Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place."

What made her reputation as a forecaster is that early on she accurately predicted the outcome of the 2018 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. As the Politico item put it:

Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.

Here is an example of conventional analysis from the period from the New York Times public opinion writer Nate Cohn about ten days before voting day:

Dozens of House races remain extremely close in the closing days of the midterms, according to New York Times Upshot/Siena College polls, making it easy to envision a Democratic blowout or a district-by-district battle for control that lasts for weeks of counting beyond the election.

The difference between the two outcomes will depend on whether enough Democratic candidates get over the top in the long list of Republican-leaning areas they’ve put into play. The Democratic gains in predominantly white, well-educated suburbs have stretched the Republican majority exceedingly thin. Fighting against this is partisan polarization, which could allow Republican incumbents to narrowly hold on to districts carried by the president.

The uncertainty isn’t just about hedging. It’s a reflection of the sheer number of highly competitive districts, and the limited data available about each one. 

Cohn was uncertain and could not decide where things were headed months after she made her accurate prediction. Bitecofer argues that her success is rooted in an appropriate appreciation of the phenomenon of "negative partisanship". In an article for the for the New Republic she begins by first articulating the perspective of Nancy Pelosi on the 2018 success.

On election night 2018, newly re-gaveled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi presided over a celebratory press conference after the Democratic Party’s recapture of a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. At the center of the party’s success, Pelosi explained, was its “For the People”agenda—and particularly the party’s laser-focus on health care access and the protection of preexisting conditions in Obamacare. Adding a new spin on Tip O’Neill’s timeworn political adage “all politics is local,” Pelosi triumphantly declared “all politics is personal.” This pragmatic emphasis on basic economic safeguards, Pelosi argued, had powered a historic blue wave. Ultimately, Democrats managed to flip 40 Republican-held House seats, ousting 31 Republican incumbents in the process.

By contrast argued Bitecofer:

...there was something very different about the 2018 cycle—and it’s something that the health care thesis fails to address. That something was voter turnout. After waning to historic lows in 2014, voter turnout in 2018 reached historic highs, smashing even the very high expectations set for the cycle in my own forecast. The 53.4 percent turnout in 2018 was closer to what we typically see in a presidential election than a midterm cycle. It dwarfed the 2014 cycle’s midterm turnout of 36.7 percent by nearly 17 points. And for all the talk of how central health care was that year, it was certainly not any more salient than it had been in the other elections since Obamacare was first enacted in 2010...

Indeed, if the health care policy debate should have been driving turnout in any major recent cycle, it was in the 2016 election, not 2018. The 2018 congressional battle over health care only came to pass, after all, because Trump ran hard on the pledge to “repeal and replace Obamacare,” and won....

So what, then, really drove the dramatic surge in voter turnout in 2018? It happened for one simple reason—or, rather, because of one simple man: Donald J. Trump. Trump’s surprise victory on election night 2016 set into motion conditions that all but guaranteed Democrats would take back control of the House of Representatives two years later, even as the GOP managed to hang on to a narrow majority in the Senate.

My forecasting model for the 2018 midterms predicted an enormous Democratic wave in the House, mostly by focusing on a dynamic known in political-science circles as negative partisanship. The idea behind negative partisanship is simple, harking back to Henry Adams’s definition of politics as the “organization of hatreds.” The determination to vote out the opposition—and the broader trend of acute polarization within the American political system—has altered virtually every facet of our political life. Negative partisanship is affecting the behavior of voters and reshaping the voting coalitions aligned behind each major party. 

Negative partisanship is also the reason why the pending 2020 presidential and congressional cycle doesn’t call to mind charged modern ideological battles such as 1964 and 1972 so much as the fateful election of 1860, which ended up kicking off the Civil War....

The U.S. Civil War that followed on the 1860 election (the last time the U.S. was so divided) is echoed in the distribution of political support among states today. The Republicans own most of the states of the old confederacy because they made a deliberate turn to the racist right in 1968 in a deal cut between Richard Nixon and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. Trump explicitly caters to the extreme right and the racial divide is a key force underpinning the partisan gap. The hyperpartisanship also explains the tenacity of Trump's support. Bitecofer in New Republic again:

We see this play out daily in the static polling on Trump’s approval numbers. These figures are virtually unresponsive to events, even to dramatic shifts in the political landscape such as Trump’s impeachment. We can also see this bedrock level of partisan attachment in election outcomes such as the special Senate election in Alabama in late 2017. In that contest, Roy Moore, the Republican nominee, faced credible accusations of child sexual abuse but still managed to accrue 48.3 percent of the state’s vote share. That outcome furnished a prime case study in polarization, with fully 91 percent of the state’s Republican electorate voting for Moore.

Her overall approach makes sense to me and I think it has broad application. In the 2018 election there were two races that illustrate what happened. In the Tennessee Senate election that year the Democrats nominated a traditional southern 'moderate', Phil Bredesen, but in trying to straddle the middle of the road he did not win over Republicans and actually alienated some liberal voters. He ended up losing by eleven points. By contrast in Georgia the Democrats nominated Stacey Abrams for Governor, a black woman progressive, the first such candidate in the state's history. She lost by less than two points and likely would have won save for the cheating and vote suppression by the Republicans.

A mentor of Bitecofer, political scientist Alan Abramowits sees the current polarization like "a bitter sports rivalry, in which the parties hang together mainly out of sheer hatred of the other team, rather than a shared sense of purpose. Republicans might not love the president, but they absolutely loathe his Democratic adversaries. And it’s also true of Democrats, who might be consumed by their internal feuds over foreign policy and the proper role of government were it not for Trump."

Essentially Bitecofer took this insight and using voter files, polling, other demographic data and most importantly, data on voter turnout, mapped it across the United States, arguing "there are Democratic and Republican coalitions, the first made of people of color, college-educated whites and people in metropolitan areas; the second, mostly noncollege whites, with a smattering of religious-minded voters, financiers and people in business, largely in rural and exurban counties." It is who shows up on voting day that matters. Once you can figure that out, you can calculate the outcome.

Bitecofer does believe that the Democrats need strategies to drive turnout this year to assure success. One such is Biden's choice for Vice-President. Hilary Clinton chose Tim Kaine, a moderate designed to appeal to centrist Republicans, exactly the wrong choice. Bitecofer thinks Biden should choose a VP to drive turnout. He has already partly done that by saying he will select a woman. As the Politico article noted she believes:

For Democrats to win, they need to fire up Democratic-minded voters. The Blue Dogs (TC's note: moderate or right leaning Democrats) who tried to narrow the difference between themselves and Trump did worse, overall, than the Stacey Abramses and Beto O’Rourkes, whose progressive ideas and inspirational campaigns drove turnout in their own parties and brought them to the cusp of victory.

She also thinks having a VP candidate that can appeal to the progressive wing of the party matters because "strategy, candidate quality, and especially candidate demographics can still matter on the margins and Democrats will roll into the fall general election with one clearly exploitable weakness: disaffection within the progressive base. The GOP will seek to exploit that weakness and Democrats would be wise to shore up every weak spot..."

On this year's Presidential election Bitecofer is the only analyst who has offered a firm prediction that Trump will lose. Here is her forecast map of the election, which predicts a Democratic majority in the Electoral College (Note that brown is colour of toss-up states):

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

But wait I hear you say, isn't Trump gaining ground with his daily press conferences on TV. Well, not so much anymore. Here are the results of a tracking poll asking respondents about his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

The pandemic is hurting Trump not helping him. Thus we see desperation initiatives like suspending all immigration - although that might end up like other Trump moves as no more than a tweet.

I expect Trump to lose.

Polling Errors in the 2019 Canadian Election - Leger Marketing Achieved the Best Results

NATIONAL POLLS

Most analysts who made calculations on the accuracy of polling in the 2019 election published their data soon after the result was made known. All the tables I saw compared polling only to the national results. I made a similar calculation that can be seen in the first table below, but I went further comparing the regional/ provincial poll numbers to election results (in a table further down).

First the national polls and how they fared. The polls are ranked by total absolute error. The red numbers indicate polling that fell below the actual results while the numbers in black indicate polling above the actual results.

A couple of observations: every pollster underestimated Conservative support and over-estimated the NDP. It is likely that the latter is an indication of a significant degree of tactical voting for the Liberals on the part of NDP supporters who, despite how they actually voted, had no hesitation expressing their true feelings to pollsters. One region where Conservative strength was under-estimated was Alberta (see below).  In most cases the polls over-estimated the People's Party of Canada (PPC), a party I suspect may now disappear. On the whole the national polls were were fairly accurate.

It is not indicated in the table, but the national polling in this election from companies that rely on online polling was more accurate than the telephone based pollsters, including those that used the computerized Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technique. However, some of the phone/IVR pollsters did better with their regional polling numbers.

REGIONAL POLLING

It is a given that the errors in regional polling are much higher as the sub-sample sizes in provinces and regions are smaller (in some cases quite small). Despite the errors and what look like high totals of absolute error I found the performance of the polls regionally was relatively good with the exception of the Conservatives (see the line at the bottom of the table labelled 'Average error all regions'). In the table below I grouped the polls using shading ranging from white to darker gray to distinguish three groupings: those that attained the best regional/provincial results, a middle group and those that were weaker. They are ranked by Total Error.

A few observations (partly based on data not shown here). It is notable that Leger (on online pollster) performed best in both national and regional polling accuracy.

One region where polling error was high was Alberta.  The polls significantly underestimated Conservative popular support. However, the error was of no importance with respect to seats. The CPC won all but one seat and would have done just as well in seats with many fewer votes. The error appears to have been rooted in turnout, which increased in all the constituencies in Alberta outside Calgary and Edmonton (it dropped in some ridings in the two cities). The most conservative region of Canada where the net outcome in all ridings was all a foregone conclusion turned out in greater numbers than in 2015. This is the region of maximum anti-Trudeau feeling, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

I wrote previously of how different the outcome would have been if votes were distributed by proportional representation. Even with a pure PR system the Conservatives would still have won 25 of 34 Alberta constituencies rather than their actual 33 (the party won nearly sixty-nine percent of the province-wide vote). Rural Alberta Conservative support was a classic example of a wasted vote in a first-past-the-post system.