Political Poling - Sniff the Dog Pee

The Reading List for 26 May 23

Narrative released its May poll early this year. That’s worthy of note since they used to take the whole month to poll.

Second thing to notice: the sample size is a mere 208 people, which is half the smallest sample they used to use and a quarter of the biggest.

Third thing: the margin of error for most of the past couple of years has been around six points, plus or minus. This latest poll is 6.8 percentage points, which gives you a a potential variation of almost 14 points for any result (seven above or seven below).

You can see the implication of that in the two vertical arrows in red and blue. Consider also that 14 points is more than the New Democrats’s support in all but one month in Narrative polling since August 2020.

Some of you might be scratching your head since these numbers are not the ones in any of the news coverage for this poll. That’s because we’ve taken out the distortion by Narrative of only reporting party choices and ignoring the undecideds. That and the huge margin of error make these polls little better than the smell of dog pee on the pole unless you do a bit of work to make the results come into clearer focus.

Look at the grey dashed line and you will see why these numbers are important and cannot be randomly sorted the way the decideds are. It’s pretty obvious that in the most recent poll the drop in Pea Sea support has all gone to the Undecided category. Not surprising given that the party is looking for a new leader and the fill-in fellow made it clear he’s not running for the job full-time. Not good news for the Liberals since it means those voters are more likely to go back home once the leadership is settled.

Now look at the longer trends since Andrew Furey became Liberal leader and Premier. Steady downwards for the Liberals. Steady rise for the Pea Seas even with a relatively weak leader and overall party performance.

Minor Liberal uptick recently but still far below where it was when he took over. That minor uptick - about four percentage points since last August - took massive spending the government cannot keep up for very long. And if you look at the number of people not willing to pick either party and the small few who say they won’t vote, you actually have more people than picked either of the three parties.

The New Democrats are politically irrelevant, which is the wish of the people running the party and working for it. That makes the NL NDP the most successful political movement in Newfoundland and Labrador history. They set out to achieve nothing and have succeeded consistently and in the most impressive way. Support in the period peaked at 17 points before falling to one third of that in a handful of months. That’s not just sucking at politics, that’s expert-level sucking.

Now… on to some interesting stuff to read.