Robert Earl Keen, Merry Christmas From the Family. Almost certainly the only Christmas song to reference AA and tampons.
Author: Tom Barrett
Zen
A word I just learned…
… reading Francis Wheen:
“The economic experiment that Margaret Thatcher initiated in Britain a quarter century ago was later imposed on much of the world by her drooling epigones, and copied even by liberal and social democratic politicians.”
Pollster Calls BS on BC Libs’ Private Election Polls
‘Show me the numbers,’ demands Insights West president, who says voters simply changed their minds.
By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca
A veteran pollster is calling BS on BC Liberal claims that the party’s internal polls predicted the May 14 provincial election result.
On the eve of the election, polls published in the media suggested a comfortable majority for the New Democratic Party. Instead, the Liberals won by more than four percentage points.
After the election, Liberal sources said their own polls had indicated they would win 48 seats. The party ended up winning 49 seats.
Steve Mossop, president of Insights West, says he doesn’t believe the stories.
During a recent panel discussion at Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre, Mossop was asked by an audience member about media reports that contrasted public pollsters’ embarrassing failures with the Liberals’ own polls.
“I knew the question would come up and my answer to that is, ‘I cry BS,'” he said. “There’s no way. I have never seen the data…
“Show me the numbers.”
Added Mossop: “Every insider that I’ve ever talked to, both in the NDP and in the Liberals, said they all thought they were doomed to fail that night. It’s very easy after the fact, once you’ve won, to say, ‘We knew it all along.'” Continue reading
A word I just learned…
… reading P.G. Wodehouse:
“Personally, if anyone had told me that a tie like that suited me, I should have risen and struck them on the mazzard, regardless of their age and sex; but poor old Bingo simply got all flustered with gratification, and smirked in the most gruesome manner.”
Like a lot of the best words, “mazzard,” as a slang term for head, is obsolete. What a pity. Time to bring it back into circulation, I say.
A modest proposal…
May election results reveal a surprising new voter bloc for the BC NDP.
By Tom Barrett
TheTyee.ca
As the B.C. New Democratic Party racks its neural tissues to discover how it blew a 20-point lead in the polls on May 14, it might be happy to learn that the news isn’t all bad.
Sure, the NDP was thumped in an election that everybody expected it to win. But it did make gains in some unexpected places.
Among the very rich, for example.
Final election results show the NDP made some of its biggest gains in some of B.C.’s wealthiest ridings. Ridings like Vancouver-False Creek, where the NDP increased its total by a healthy 3,479 votes over its 2009 showing. Ditto for Vancouver-Fairview (up 2,768 votes) and North Vancouver-Seymour (up 2,343 votes).
All three of those ridings are among the 10 constituencies with the highest median after-tax incomes, according to BC Stats. In fact, six of the 10 ridings where the NDP made its biggest gains May 14 are on that top 10 income list. (The figures, while the latest available for income by constituency, come from the 2006 census and are a bit dated. But heck, a riding that was wealthy in 2006 is probably still doing pretty well today.)
The table below shows the wealthy ridings where the NDP vote increased the most. The margin columns show who won the riding in the last two elections and the winner’s margin as a percentage of the total vote.
| Riding | 09 Margin | 13 Margin |
|---|---|---|
| Vancouver-False Creek | Lib 28.9 | Lib 15.5 |
| Vancouver-Fairview | Lib 4.9 | NDP 5.1 |
| North Vancouver-Seymour | Lib 31.8 | Lib 18.0 |
| Vancouver-Point Grey | Lib 10.1 | NDP 4.4 |
| Surrey-Cloverdale | Lib 32.9 | Lib 30.5 |
| West Vancouver-Capilano | Lib 53.0 | Lib 44.7 |
As shown, two of these wealthy ridings, Vancouver-Fairview and Vancouver-Point Grey, abandoned the Liberals for the NDP. And the Liberals’ victory margins fell in all of the other four. Clearly, in B.C. the class war is riddled with quislings. Continue reading
A word I just learned…
… reading S.J. Perelman:
“On which grisly note, I pinch your claws, wish you all possible success in your chosen career (womanizing and refined peculation of Her Majesty’s inland taxes), and beg your return favor.”
A word I just learned…
… reading S.J. Perelman:
“Really, it’s unspeakable, and while you may feel that you’re in a wasteland, that the vitality of New York does occasionally infuse one, and that LA is sheer barbarism, don’t repine unduly.”
The weight on a BC pollster’s shoulders
Many flubbed their May 14 election calls. Here’s one who thinks he knows why.
By Tom Barrett
June 21, 2013
TheTyee.ca
Pollster Kyle Braid thinks he’s figured out how he missed so badly in the May 14 election.
Like almost every other pollster, Braid, a vice-president at Ipsos Reid, came up with results on the eve of the election that suggested a healthy victory for the New Democratic Party. When that turned into a healthy victory for the BC Liberals, Braid and the other pollsters were left with egg dripping from their faces.
The last Ipsos poll, taken May 13, suggested the NDP had the support of 45 per cent of decided voters, compared to 37 per cent for the BC Liberals. The final results were NDP 40 per cent, Liberals 44.
Braid told an audience at the Spur Festival in Vancouver this week that he thinks he adjusted his data when he shouldn’t have and failed to adjust it when he should have.
Every polling company adjusts, or weights, its samples. That’s because samples rarely look like the general population. They may, to take a simple example, contain more women than the electorate as a whole. Continue reading
Green gains likely came at BC Libs’ expense
Further election number crunching that suggests the centre-left vote split is myth.
By Tom Barrett
May 31, 2013
TheTyee.ca
The Green Party’s biggest gains in the May 14 election seem to have come at the expense of the Liberals.
During the campaign, the New Democrats seemed obsessed with losing votes to the Greens. The Liberals even tweaked the NDP by running a pro-Green newspaper ad in Victoria near the end of the campaign.
Maybe the Liberals should have saved their money.
The final count shows the five ridings where the Green vote increased the most were all in southern Vancouver Island. And in four of those ridings, the Liberal vote dropped more than the NDP vote.
One popular theory holds that the Greens steal votes from the NDP. If that were true, you’d expect the Greens’ gains to come at the expense of the NDP in these ridings. But that doesn’t seem to have happened.
In Oak Bay-Gordon Head, where Andrew Weaver won the Greens their first seat ever, the Greens picked up 8,392 more votes than in 2009. At the same time, the NDP vote dropped by 3,780.
But the Liberals, who won the seat in 2009, saw their vote drop by 4,110. Those votes don’t seem to have gone to the Conservative party, which is usually assumed to be the biggest vote-splitting threat to the Liberals. The Conservative vote increased by only 492 over 2009.
The numbers suggest that the Greens pulled a lot of support from former Liberal voters.
Libs suffered in Island ridings
Now, it’s possible that a whole lot of Liberal supporters stayed home May 14 and a whole bunch of new Green supporters turned out for the first time. Or a lot of Liberal supporters switched to the NDP and some NDP supporters switched to the Greens. But, given the size of the Liberal collapse, it seems likely that plenty of former Liberal supporters went Green.
The overall number of valid votes in Oak Bay-Gordon Head increased by 994, or four per cent, suggesting that Weaver’s support didn’t all come from new voters.
The Greens’ other big increase came in Saanich North and the Islands, which also went Liberal in 2009. This time, after all the ballots were counted, the NDP took this riding in a close three-way race.
The Green vote increased 6,913. The NDP vote dropped 2,363. The Liberal vote dropped 2,784. There was no Conservative candidate.
Overall, the vote in Saanich North and the Islands increased by 2,365, a hefty eight per cent over 2009. Continue reading
Rannygazoo 