Angry in the Great White North

As recently as February 6, just over a month ago, the Liberals said they were ready for an election:

Officials from the opposition parties insist, however, they too are ready to roll as soon as an election writ is dropped. They say several false election starts since the Conservatives assumed power in February 2006 means they are better prepared than they might otherwise have been.

This is particularly true of the Liberals. The party abstained in critical confidence votes during the fall parliamentary session to avoid forcing an election when it wasn't ready with either candidates or a platform.

The Liberals now have nominated 212 candidates.

"We've got the money. We've got the organization. We've got the platform. We're ready to go," said Greg Fergus, director of the Liberal party.

Was Greg Fergus lying?  On February 27, Senator David Smith was directly contradicting Greg Fergus:

About 15 people attended and they were divided on whether the caucus should defeat the government. Insiders say that Deputy Leader Michael Ignatieff made a "passionate plea" for the Liberals to trigger an election.

Mr. Ignatieff is on the "hawk" side of the caucus. Many of his supporters want to go to the polls now so as not to be seen continually supporting the Tory economic agenda.

But he was shot down, most significantly by national campaign co-chair David Smith, a veteran organizer and senator from Ontario. Mr. Smith said simply that the party wasn't ready to mount a national campaign, one insider said.

So what happened between in exactly three weeks?  Did someone in the Liberal Party blow the election funds on a wild weekend at Casino-rama?

I don't think so.

I think Greg Fergus was being honest about election readiness.  The Liberals were ready to go.  But then it was also true that the Liberals were doing better in the polls in December and January.

But something has happened and suddenly the Liberals aren't ready, according to David Smith.

That something must have been the polls.  But we all know that the polls have not really moved all that much.  The polls have consistently shown either the Tories and the Grits in a close race (with a small Tory lead), or they show the Conservatives somewhat farther ahead.

But those are the polls we see.  Those are the cheap polls knocked off for the news media looking for a story.  Real polls are much more complex in their questioning, take much longer to prepare, and are more elaborate in their execution.

For example, these polls go down to the riding level, eschewing the national averages that are interesting, but cannot predict the real winner (or at least the distribution of seats).  These internal polls are also careful about how to deal with respondents who refuse to provide data.  The cheap poll skips the person who doesn't pick up the phone and moves on to the next number, and that can affect the quality of the data, depending on who is taking the place of the person who didn't answer the phone.  Heck, CBS doesn't even pretend to try to prepare a representative list:

How Do We Choose The People We Interview?

In a nutshell, we choose the people we interview completely at random. We do not choose our respondents based on their age, race, political philosophy, or any other characteristic.

In fact, when we reach people at home, we have no idea who they are or what categories they fall into. We only know one thing about them – their telephone number.

How Do We Get Those Telephone Numbers?

A computer chooses the telephone numbers of these people for us, and it does so essentially at random.

The process that the computer uses is called “random-digit dialing.” We tell the computer the area code and the exchanges of every telephone in the United States. First the computer chooses a group of area codes and exchanges at random. Once it selects these exchanges, it then picks the last four number effectively by chance.

Why Do The Telephone Numbers Have To Be Random?

We go to great lengths to make sure that the numbers are picked as randomly as possible. Why is that important? It assures that we get old and young people, rich and poor people, conservative and liberal people – and everybody in between.

Actually, this sounds bizarre.  Taking numbers at random is not an example of going to "great lengths".  A great length would be interviewing 5000 people, collecting demographic information along with the answers to the polling questions, and then assuring that enough representative data was extracted from different groups of interest.  The CBS method (which is likely representative of any media poll in Canada or the United States) is the lazy equivalent to hoping with your eyes closed that the sample isn't skewed...much...

You can be certain that internal party polls are different in the following ways:

• They never end, but are ongoing efforts that add to data already collected.
• They aren't random, or at least not solely random.
• There is far more consideration of who is providing answers and how to weigh those demographic factors.
• They provide answers quite likely to be significantly different to media polls.

Greg Fergus was right when he said the Liberals could fight an election...when the numbers were better.  But the numbers must have gone down, and down significantly.  When that happened, a potential election just got a lot more expensive, what with the extra advertising needed to turn things around.

So when David Smith said that the Liberals weren't ready to fight an election, he was talking about this election, not the one that the Liberals thought they were facing in the first few weeks of the new year.

Of course, the polls could change, and suddenly the Liberals would be ready again.  Good luck with that.  With the self-inflicted damage from the most recent rash of voting abstentions, the Liberals might struggle mightily and never see the polls move back to a point where they feel their anemic election machine can pull out a win.