Resisting the pull of cynicism since 1969.

Friday, May 04, 2007

In absentia

I seem to have entered one of my longer fallow periods. My apologies. (By now you know I always come back from those, though, right?)

While I recharge my batteries, I suggest you have a look at James Bow's post about why the polls are all over the place. I've been thinking similar thoughts lately. (Which probably accounts for the fallow period, come to think of it.)

Anyway, catch you all sooner or later, and be sure to get out and enjoy the springtime!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Welcome back,once a blogger always a blogger...

susansmith said...

IP, I want you to link to Dan Baril who use to be May's strategist. He did some recent polling, and I think you would be fasinated in how he conducted his poll around voter preference.
He does a great intro and talks about "the volatility we see in political polling data one week to the next."

As he stated, " Stop focusing so much asking Canadians how they intend voting, and instead ask what they want the outcome to be. Because the difference between what Canadians want is vastly, vastly different from what they end up with. And so long as we have a disconnect between what Canadians want versus what Canadians get, we will have political instability and polling volatility."

"The question we asked was not 'how do you intend voting?' although we asked that too, but rather 'how many seats do you want each of the major parties to have when all is said and done.' To my knowledge, this question has never been asked before."

this is what Canadians say they want

Seats %

Conservative 97 32%
Liberal 81 26%
NDP 49 16%
Green 42 14%
Bloc 39 13%
Total 308 100%

Anyway, here is the link: http://www.danbaril.com/

Thank you Dan for thinking outside of the box.

Idealistic Pragmatist said...

dirk,

I'm afraid I'm still feeling fallow...but I promise I'll be back. I always am. :-)

Jan,

That's fascinating! Thanks for the link.