It’s starting… The inane red herring toss we’ve come to know as national election coverage.
An EKOS poll conducted for the CBC showed that the Conservatives and the Liberals were at a “dead heat” at 32.6 per cent of the vote. The NDP trailed at 16.5, followed by the Greens and the Bloc, at 9.9 and 8.3 per cent respectively. EKOS says that “the race between the two parties has been very, very close over the summer, with the Liberals erasing a small but persistent lead enjoyed by the Conservatives.” They did this by “improving their fortunes in the crucial battleground of Ontario.” They even compared this week’s numbers to polling results from the same time last year.
You remember, this time last year? That week we also didn’t have an election, let alone a race, or a battlefield? That one. The CBC must have remembered it, because they saw fit to commission the poll, and to talk about the results all day.
Polls are many things – a barometer of public mood, filler for the 24-hour news cycle, a handy tool for political parties to gauge support. What they aren’t is news we can use, so to speak.
The horse race metaphor is annoying, for starters: Are the Grits and the Tories neck and neck? By how many lengths are they beating the NDP? How long are their bodies, anyway? Are the Greens leading the Bloc by a nose? Wait a sec. Are they even running on the same track? Why do I imagine a lot of dead horses in all this?
Then there’s that irritating way that national polls have of predicting results without having any correlation to how we actually vote in our system, which is riding by riding, winner-takes-all. If, like me, you’re among the majority of Canadians who didn’t vote for the winning candidate in your particular riding, your vote counts for nothing. We might as well just split our vote right at the booth. Try explaining that to the next telephone pollster.
Oh, but polling works, you might say, as one political journalist said to me recently when I brought up my frustration.
Well, I suppose if your goal is to predict that a government will be formed with a majority of people voting against it, well, it does do a pretty good job of that. But the breakdown of seats in Parliament almost never reflects national support levels for the various parties: with comparable support nationally, the Greens never win any seats at all, but sometimes the Bloc can form the official opposition. In some provinces, half the vote will get you all the seats. Oops!
And don’t get me started on the regional implications of reporting national polls as if they mean anything here in Saskatchewan. The EKOS poll asked 110 people from the Manitoba/Saskatchewan “region” which party they would vote for if an election were held tomorrow. Never mind that there is no such region, or that the margin of error was nearly 10 per cent or that the number of possible candidates outnumbers the sample size.
That’s just reflecting the reality of our system. It doesn’t matter what the poll says here, once the polling numbers from that “crucial battleground” of Ontario have been counted. I guess I should be happy they asked us at all.
By the way, according to the EKOS poll, in Manitoba/Saskatchewan, the Conservatives got 46.3 per cent of voting intention, the Liberals 18.6, the NDP 25.9 and the Greens 9.1. How sweet. If past elections are any indication, that breakdown will disappear entirely during the actual election – you know, when we actually go to the polls – and we’ll be seen as a solid sea of blue. At least in the imaginary world of opinion polls we appear a little more diverse and progressive in our political choices.
I’m not saying polls shouldn’t be reported. It’s just that reporting every burp and fart collected by the polling companies about how anyone feels on a given day about hypothetical elections is not news, and it’s not helpful, not to me anyway.
But again, these polls are accurate, and that’s all were aiming for right? The news has to be accurate, after all. You can’t report every day on how broken the first-past-the-post system is. That would be too political. God knows we wouldn’t want any real discourse on anything political.
Oh, I give up.
Call me.
Sasquatch columnist Carle Steel is a Regina writer and journalist.