Why you shouldn't trust political polls on the Surrey mayoral race

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      The most recent telephone poll in Surrey shows that Coun. Linda Hepner has a significant lead over her two main rivals, former mayor Doug McCallum and Coun. Barinder Rasode, in the race to replace Dianne Watts as mayor.

      Naturally, it was commissioned by Hepner's party, Surrey First.

      A previous poll this month showed McCallum in front with an even larger lead.

      The media often report these surveys in a dry, factual manner even though the last provincial election demonstrated that polling data can be utterly unreliable.

      Polls can't be trusted for a bunch of reasons, including an incredibly high rate of refusal. According to an overview by Pew Research, the response rate to telephone surveys fell to nine percent in 2012, down from 36 percent in 1997.

      That's fewer than one in 10 people bothering to answer questions.

      So who's left? Often people with lots of time on their hands—notably retired folks whose first language is English. It's why some pollsters have switched to online polling, but that creates a new set of problems.

      As we learned in the last provincial election, younger people are often eager to participate, but they don't always show up at polling stations.

      Compounding the difficulty of surveying in Surrey is the diversity of the population. People who don't speak very good English (and who quite possibly might be supporters of Rasode) won't want to chat with someone who phones them in English to ask about their political preferences.

      Then there's the issue of push polling, which is actually telemarketing disguised as polling to send negative messages about political opponents.

      According to the American Association for Public Opinion Research, these surveys "usually ask one or only a few questions about a single candidate or a single issue; the questions are uniformly strongly negative (or sometimes uniformly positive) descriptions of the candidate or issue; the organization or call center conducting the calls is not identified, or a phony name is used; and the calls are placed to large numbers of people."

      Let's be blunt. Polls are often financed before elections to build momentum for candidates.

      Hepner's party can take the latest numbers it commissioned, go out to the business community, and ask for money to help its candidate buy more advertising and hire people to help win the election.

      McCallum is likely leveraging the earlier poll in the same way.

      Here's another fact: in the last Surrey election, only 25.2 percent of eligible voters even bothered to cast ballots. (You can read more on this issue on Laila Yuile's blog.)

      This Surrey mayoral election will not be won or lost on the basis of polls. The outcome will be determined by turnout.

      Whoever gets more of their voters into polling stations on November 15 is going to be the winner. 

      Three months before the 2010 Calgary election, Naheed Nenshi had the support of one percent of the electorate.

      Yet through the shrewd use of social media and the support of key "influencers", including kids at schools who talked to their parents, Nenshi pulled off a stunning upset.

      His example demonstrates that it's still far too early to count Rasode out of the race.

      Comments

      2 Comments

      OMG

      Oct 21, 2014 at 10:13am

      I'm guessing that if your gal Rasode was tops in either poll, this story would never have been written.

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