Election Campaign 2021 and the polls

Election 2021 features quite a few polls including daily tracking polls from Nanos and Mainstreet, who were among the most accurate polling firms in 2019. The table below presents calculations of the difference between actual election results and the late campaign provincial & regional subsections of national polls in 2019. I converted the errors into absolute values, added them up and ranked the pollsters. The top three performers in 2019 (seen below with a white background) were Leger, Mainstreet and Nanos.

In my view the polling firms in the middle with the light gray background also did well - Abacus, Research Co and Campaign Research. The others in darker gray below were less accurate.

These pollster performances could look different in 2021.  The pollster with the best record over time is Nanos, the firm doing daily tracking polls for the Globe and Mail/ CTV News.  So far the polls suggest that the Liberals' hoped for majority is a chimera. I hate the term "polls show"; polls are not so unswervingly accurate, so they deserve less declarative language.

The results so far should be regarded as tentative and preliminary.  The arrival of the autumn will bring TV debates in the week following Labour Day. They are likely to be highly influential on the final result. 

Although parties devote much space to detailed policy proposals the public looks at the big picture: it is symbolic politics that are decisive. 

The Liberals popularity declined almost as soon as the writ was dropped. It is likely the Trudeau government was unpopular before writ. Six years of accumulated grievances will do that. However, the Liberals' polling and other public opinion research such as focus groups should have been looking for that and they ought to have found it. Clearly they weren't looking.

The Dishonesty of Erin O'Toole

The Conservatives are running an extremely dishonest, but highly effective campaign, a much more effective campaign than Andrew Scheer mounted in 2019. 

An Andrew Coyne column in the Globe and Mail helps illustrate the nature of the Conservative campaign.

"...So Conservatives must be thrilled to find Erin O’Toole showing promise of the requisite shamelessness. The Conservative leader has not just survived the inevitable Liberal attacks in the campaign’s first week, he has seemed almost to invite them, luring the Grits into wasting valuable rhetorical ammunition on a series of dummy controversies.

On vaccine mandates, on abortion, on health care, Mr. O’Toole has said things that at first sound difficult, controversial, or at least noteworthy, but which on closer examination turn out to mean nothing – nothing, that is, substantively different from Liberal policy, the status quo, or both. Liberal attempts to turn these into wedge issues have accordingly largely fizzled.

Some of this facility had been in evidence even before the Conservative platform was released. The Conservative promise to balance the budget “over the next decade” is a masterpiece of meaninglessness: the latest projections from the Parliamentary Budget Office show the budget will be all but balanced – a deficit of less than 1 per cent of GDP – inside of four years. It would require heroic acts of profligacy to prevent it from balancing in 10."

Coyne is right about this meaningless promise, but it lets the Conservatives appear to be fiscally prudent, when it is probably their intent to run large deficits in budgets, which include big tax cuts for their friends, financed by additional borrowing. It is the symbolism that counts. Quite brilliant, but entirely dishonest. 

More Coyne:

".... On abortion, Mr. O’Toole’s vociferously pro-choice position seemed to deprive the Liberals of a target – until the release of the Conservative platform, with its vow to “protect the conscience rights of health-care professionals” who object to providing services such as abortion or assisted suicide. Again the Liberals pounced, only to find their wedge blunted once again: doctors are not required to provide those services now.

They are required to provide “effective referrals,” something Mr. O’Toole had promised to scrap during his leadership campaign. Would he still? Alas, no, as he later clarified: the promise now is merely to “protect” doctors’ existing conscience rights. The status quo, in other words."

Coyne should ask the rhetorical question if this is no change: why say anything?  Because that rhetoric is a strong symbolic bow towards the anti-abortion crowd within Conservative ranks.  He is saying "I am sympathetic to your feelings. I will try to do something for you." It may not amount to much - public opinion in Canada is strongly pro-choice. Stephen Harper did not try to introduce an abortion law. However, he firmly prohibited Canada's international aid money from being spent on family planning that included access to abortion. In other words he is saying he is with the anti-abortionists in spirit if not in practice.  Again, brilliant but dishonest.

We go through the same thing again on health care. Coyne again:

"By the time the Liberals shifted their focus to health care, they were already looking punched out. Still, did they really think, in 2021, after so much talk of the perils of online misinformation, they could get away with posting a video of Mr. O’Toole saying he would allow provinces to contract with private, for-profit providers, while snipping out the bit about ensuring “universal access remains paramount”?

Again: private provision of services within a system of universal public insurance is common practice now – under the current, i.e. Liberal government. All the Liberal war room achieved by this ham-fisted gambit was to make themselves the issue, rather than their intended target.

Mr. O’Toole’s talent for double-talk may not make for much coherent policy. But as a survival tactic, its merits are undoubted. The point of a wedge issue is to force a party leader to choose between his base and the broader public. It takes some artful duplicity to wriggle out of this trap: to adopt a position of such bottomless vacuity, impenetrable yet suggestive, as to allow each group to take away from it what they prefer.

Again we have to ask why say this. Because O'Toole wants to appeal to the pro-privatization part of the Canadian electorate. This includes many affluent Canadians who want to buy their way to the front of the line, something that would seriously undermine Canada's health care system. However, his rhetorical frame lets him deny it. My impression is that it seems to have worked at the symbolic level, which is the point of the gambit. However, it is remarkably dishonest and suggests to me that O'Toole is further to the right than he is letting on. Coyne seems clueless about all this: symbolic politics have a reality underneath that should not be ignored.

So far I have neglected to mention the NDP. To date they are running a successful (for a third party) 'happy warrior' campaign, and Jagmeet Singh is achieving new heights of personal popularity. More on the NDP in a future post.