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The most effective way to acquire this sample through random-number dialed phone polls, but due to the prohibitive cost, they are far from the norm. Instead, many have turned to the internet to cast a wider net for less; the problem with this is some feel you cannot produce a truly random sample this way, leading to potentially misleading data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cristine de Clercy, a professor, specializing in Canadian politics at the University of Western Ontario, says reporters have to not only get better at understanding what the data says but also identify if it is strong in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI would say there is good data, and there is bad data,\u201d de Clercy says. \u201cThere\u2019s data that is collected responsibly with a somewhat informed understanding of how to collect it. That\u2019s trustworthy. And then there\u2019s some data that just wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is getting worse with online polling and online surveys, and I say this as someone who does online polling, but the problematical data is ever more present,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So was there bad data in the 2020 election? The answer isn\u2019t so black and white. The first question is what exactly did they get wrong, and the most egregious answer is Florida. 538, a popular website that aggregates polling data had Biden winning The Sunshine State by two and a half points. One of the polls cited was conducted by Emerson College, an organization 538 gives an A- rating when it comes to accuracy. The poll, conducted just five days before in-person voting began, had Biden winning the state by six points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump won by over three.<\/p>\n\n\n
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David Coletto, the CEO of Abacus Data, says the mistake came from an underrepresentation of conservative voters in polling, a problem that is also present in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJust how polarized the U.S. is. I don\u2019t think Canada\u2019s, I don\u2019t think we\u2019re there yet,\u201d Coletto, whose company celebrated its 10-year-anniversary last July, says. \u201cBut there is still a demographic I think is not accessible to pollsters.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
P.J. Fournier, owner and operator of 338.com, an aggregate website similar to 538 but for Canadian politics, took it a step further, saying it was not just conservatives that polling might have a problem reaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA lot of people say conservatives are underestimated, and that\u2019s not always true,\u201d Fournier says, citing the overestimation of Ontario Tory votes in the 2019 Federal election. \u201cWhat seems to be true is that the more extreme elements on the political spectrum, be it on the right or the left, are underestimated.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Robert Benzie, the Queen\u2019s Park bureau chief for The Toronto Star, says divisive candidates also have a massive impact on the accuracy of polls. Benzie cites this exact effect when trying to parse out what happened in Florida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWith some types of political candidates people will not tell the pollsters that they\u2019re voting for them, and I think that\u2019s what happened in Florida with Trump,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Language barriers can lead to missing vast swaths of the population. It happened in Florida with the Cuban vote coming out strong for Trump, and it even has the potential to cause problems in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019re in B.C.., and we aren\u2019t, and frankly we don\u2019t offer a survey in Mandarin or South Asian languages, and those communities are so concentrated that we might miss something,\u201d Coletto says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of these problems led to a surprising result in Florida and gave plenty of ammunition to people who wanted to take a shot. But Florida is just one state, and while 538 may have gotten it and North Carolina wrong, they correctly predicted the results of every other race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe tendency for people and the media is to always report on polls when they miss.\u201d <\/p>-David Coletto<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n All of this means the issue may not have been the information at large, but how it was delivered by journalists and interpreted by the public. Coletto says the number one thing he thinks people don\u2019t recognize about polling is how remarkable it is that they can use something, primarily a science, to predict a largely unpredictable thing, human behaviour, and thinks journalists can do a better job at reporting that fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe tendency for people and I think for the media sometimes, is to always report on polls when they miss, and not the times they actually do an outstanding job of capturing the mood of the country or how people are feeling on a particular issue,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the media does not merely rely on polls but also on aggregate sites like 538 and 338. Fournier is a writer for Maclean\u2019s magazine, sharing his analysis of the polls he aggregates, and 538 was acquired by ABC in 2018. This has led to a debate as to whether we should be relying on a service that doesn\u2019t actually have a foothold in science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMathematicians sometimes say aggregating polls is not a real statistical method, you should not do that,\u201d he says. \u201cThey have a point from a mathematical point of view if you take two polls using different methods, different samples, different field days that you should not average them out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Fournier goes on to say the value of aggregation lies not in theory but in its results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m a scientist, and what we do, we make approximations of nature,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd so even though by the book, mathematically, it\u2019s not quite what we should do, if it works 90 per cent of the time, over an extended period of time, it cannot be useless.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n De Clercy shares Fournier\u2019s opinion as long as the initial polls aggregators are using are sound. \u201cI would never argue that a site like 538 or the Canadian version 338, they should never be shut down because good data is always more information,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem arises when people with bad data use these websites\u2019 outcomes to justify their own, all based on getting the same result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Benzie says while he may look at these websites with a passing interest, he would not use them as content to produce a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mirroring the political system many pollsters try to understand, there is division. Both sides of the aisle are adamant they are right, even as the data points in favour of pollsters. Still, there is always room to improve, and, thankfully, always another election to do just that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Nov. 4 election looked bad at the beginning (for who?), but did it stay that way?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",778,586,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1-170x120.png",160,113,true],"medium":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1-300x226.png",300,226,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1-768x578.png",696,524,true],"large":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",696,524,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",778,586,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",778,586,false],"td_150x0":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",150,113,false],"td_218x150":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",199,150,false],"td_300x0":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",300,226,false],"td_324x400":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",324,244,false],"td_485x360":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",478,360,false],"td_696x0":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",696,524,false],"td_1068x0":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",778,586,false],"td_1920x0":["https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/election_map-ONLINE-1.png",778,586,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"convergencemag","author_link":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/author\/convergencemag\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"The Nov. 4 election looked bad at the beginning (for who?), but did it stay that way?","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2446"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4207,"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446\/revisions\/4207"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humberjournalism.com\/convergencemag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/vpms1.humber.smartmanagedservers.com\/convergencemag\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/03\/RL_LogoBenzie-ONLINE-1-1024x683.jpg\")