I think this is my dream poll

From the Globe and Mail.

CP: 32%
LP: 25%
NDP: 21%
GP: 12%
BQ: 8%

The Conservatives down, the Liberals mired in the mid-twenties but not tanking, the NDP and the Greens both at record highs. If only it were election day.

Apathy

It's hard to muster up any enthusiasm for talking about politics lately. Although I'm definitely still firmly behind the NDP on policy matters, I can certainly see why the latest SES poll sees more and more Canadians (spontaneously!) choosing "none of the above." "Unprecedented," Nik Nanos calls it. I'll see him that and raise him a "depressing."

I'm convinced that this kind of cynicism can't be about policy, nor can it even be about the inevitable exhaustion over yet one more political scandal. It's about rhetoric. It's about being sick of the pounding negativity that pervades our entire political process these days, in ALL parties. It's ironic but perhaps not surprising that the politician I've been finding most inspiring these days isn't technically a politician yet at all.

When they've lost the political geeks, who do they have left that's really listening? The journalists? (Maybe?)

Riffing on the SES "best prime minister" data

I already linked to Accidental Deliberations' excellent post over at the update on my last post, but I wanted to single one part out for special attention:

[The Greens deciding not to run a candidate against Dion] would be a bizarre choice at the best of times, but it's all the more so given the party's current supporters' actual preference among possible PMs.

That's right: as the lone party leader who already holds the dubious honour of being her own party's supporters' second choice for PM, May is throwing her support to their fourth choice (or sixth if one counts "none of the above" and "unsure") in an attempt to stop their first choice. Which only seems likely to alienate both a good chunk of current Green supporters, and anybody who might otherwise have flipped from supporting the Cons.

More of a visual person? Well, the poll AD points to summarizes Greens' first choice for prime minister as the following:


Harper in first place, May in second, Layton in third, and Dion in fourth. That's a terribly amusing statistic. Kind of hilarious, really.

Let's not stop there, though! While the data sets for the other parties aren't quite so funny, they're still pretty interesting. Here, for example, is the Liberals' chart:



And here's the Conservatives':



And here's the NDP's:



And here's the Bloc's:



And most of interest to all the parties trying to sway new voters, the undecideds:



Some fun facts about the data:

• An awful lot of Canadians are planning to vote for parties other than the party with the leader they'd most like to see as PM.
• The only party leaders to have more than 50% support for PM by their own parties are Harper and Duceppe.
• More than a quarter of Liberal voters prefer Harper to Dion.
• The party least likely to think Harper would make the best prime minister is the NDP. And yet even that number is greater than the number of NDP voters who would pick Dion as their first choice.
• Apart from partisan Greens, the most likely party to name May as best PM is the NDP.
• Of all the parties' supporters, Green voters are most likely to say "none of the above" as their first choice.
• The undecideds' first choice for PM is Harper, even over "unsure."
• A number greater than zero of all of the major parties' voters thinks the best prime minister of Canada would be Gilles Duceppe.

What I'm really curious about is people's second choices for PM. Too bad that question wasn't included.

How not to write poll questions, take two

Remember that cracked-out Angus Reid poll? The one showing the Liberals at 22% and the NDP beating them in Québec? Well, they've drilled down in the data a bit more to determine that "two in five Canadians pick Harper as PM," and normally level-headed conservative blogger Greg Staples is crowing over it.

Now, putting aside that Angus Reid must have been smoking something really nice the day they gathered the data for that poll, do you really think "two in five Canadians like our current prime minister" is something to smile about? Come on, even George Bush can achieve that.

What that spin on the poll glosses over is the fact that an awfully large chunk of Canadians still don't want either Harper or Dion. So a poll that makes respondents choose between those two options isn't worth the bits and bytes it's written on.

Poll narratives

There have been some puzzling narratives weaving their way through the Canadian punditry and amateur punditry in the last few weeks, stemming from a sort of pre-election fever and fuelled by almost daily polling. I won't link to specifics, but we've all seen them. They go sort of like this: The Liberals/NDP/Bloc are in such big trouble that they're in danger of never winning another election/disappearing from the political scene entirely/rendering the sovereigntist movement irrelevant. And we've only got about two seconds to figure out why, so instead of actually sitting down and analyzing the situation, we'll just blame it all on Stéphane Dion's/Jack Layton's/Gilles Duceppe's obvious complete failure to resonate with Canadian voters.

To make things worse, each version of this narrative always focuses on one of the above possibilities, conveniently ignoring the parts of the picture that don't fit with the way the storyteller wants to view the world. Partisan Liberals will talk about how the NDP is hemorrhaging votes because Layton has dared to negotiate with the Taliban Tories on climate change legislation, partisan Tories or New Democrats will talk about how the Liberals are in freefall because they picked the wrong leader, and all sorts of people will look at the Bloc's numbers and gleefully declare sovereigntists permanently pacified by Harper's big-ticket gifts to Quebec. A reality check suggests that they're all a little bit right about the details...and yet without looking at the big picture, the overall conclusions are completely wrong.



This chart, which shows all of the various polls that have been conducted so far this month (Decima March 1st, Angus Reid March 2nd, Ipsos Reid March 3rd, Decima March 8th, and Strategic Counsel March 15th) shows a pretty even picture with a couple of blips here and there. There's no obvious trend upward or downward for anyone. And if you compare the averages to the 2006 election results, the Liberals are down a bit over a point, the NDP is down a bit over two, and the Bloc is down a bit under two. A bit troubling for partisans of any of those stripes, certainly, but hardly Titanic material, and certainly not evidence that they're all on the wrong track with leaders who need to be thrown overboard at the first available opportunity. And if you consider the fact that the Tories (who according to these same narratives are supposedly eyeing a majority again) are actually doing no better than they did in January of 2006, well, there's just not a lot to get all that worried about. Far from being in freefall, the Liberals seem to be holding their own under their new leader. The Bloc had their dip, but they're holding steady now, too. And as for the NDP, well, with only slightly lower numbers, a tonne of money in the bank, a terrific new ad campaign, and a national strategy conference this weekend, they're certainly not going anywhere.

So if none of the supposedly dying parties are actually dying, then what's really going on? Well, I don't have any hard data on this, but from talking to Green voters, I have some ideas. I don't mean the partisan Greens, who are as smug and arrogant with their 9.8% as the Liberals ever were at 45%; I mean the people who make up the couple of percentage points each that the Greens have taken from the other parties. These people aren't looking in that direction because they hate Dion's accent or Layton's moustache or Duceppe's little bonnet--they're doing it because they actually like the idea of the existence of a Green Party. They don't actually know much about the party, mind, but the idea of the party resonates with them. To these people, the Greens are a brand-new party that wasn't there before and is totally untainted by actual, you know, governing experiences, and that's kinda neat. Now, whether this vague "kinda neat" factor will be enough to bring them the kind of success we're seeing in these polls in an actual election (or for that matter, whether they will get any seats) is still an open question. But even if it isn't enough, there's no denying that there's a new kid on the political block. And this means that the old, lazy narratives of "the Liberals/NDP/Bloc have gone down a couple of points and so Dion/Layton/Duceppe must be doing a crappy job as leader" simply don't work anymore. It's a new game board.

The real story here--and one I haven't seen a single pundit or blogger try to tell yet--is that a new party is being added to the political scene and yet none of the old parties are actually disappearing from it. The Liberals, NDP, and Bloc have all sacrificed a point or two to the Greens' surge, but there's no single party that the Greens can be seen to be replacing. The three older left-wing and centrist parties may trade some of their soft support with each other every now and then, but the vast majority of their support is actually quite firm, and not going anywhere despite the emergence of the Greens as a new force. Before our eyes, we're watching the Canadian political scene transform itself from a four-party system into a five-party one. And that's pretty extraordinary.

How not to write polling questions

Like at least one other blogger, I have been participating in the Innovative Research Group's Canada 20/20 online political surveys for over a year. Their most recent survey, which I filled out a few weeks back, focused on Kyoto and the environment.

I often find their questions somewhat difficult to answer, but there was one on the last survey that took the proverbial cake: choosing between "Canada must do its part to fight global warming, and implementing the Kyoto accord is the best way to do it" and "Canada must do its part, but implementing the Kyoto accord is just one way we can do it". If you believe, as I and many others do, that Kyoto is important but not nearly enough, what do you check?

After some deliberation, I finally checked the second unsatisfactory option. And what do we find today? A headline in the Ottawa Citizen (hat-tip to Political Staples) declaring that "Voters will forgive PM for ignoring Kyoto" (!) because "59 percent" say that Kyoto is "only one possible way to go."

*throws up hands*