Home

Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Polls are for Dogs?


There is a saying attributed to former Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. When asked about polls, he employed the homonym of the word and declared that they were for dogs as they were the only ones who knew how to properly use them. 

Polls do get a bad name - sometimes deservedly so, and many times not. Sometimes they capture the essence of a race and pick up the trend, and other times they are wildly off. In any given race, you will get different polls that say very different things.

Whether it is the prospects of Boris Johnson’s Premiership, or the current election here in Canada, people follow the polls and have very animated opinions about what they mean, or not.

I have had some limited and passing experience with polling, so I am sympathetic to the companies and do feel that, by and large, they endeavor to do solid work. And why wouldn’t they? Bad data makes you look unprofessional and incompetent – hardly a winning business model.

Every player in the industry wants to do their best work, and they go through a great deal of methodological review to be as accurate as possible. The problem is that they need to rely on subjects that can be as changeable as the weather.

A poll is a snapshot of a body in motion. Like a still photo of a race at the mid-point, it gives you the relative position of each ‘runner’, inferring the action up to that point, and mildly predictive of what comes next. It can’t show you that within ten yards a runner may stumble, or another gets their second wind. All it can do is tell you that on a given moment in time, that is where they all are. Blink, and it can change.

It could be that our expectation of wanting to know the future makes us project more meaning on individual polls than we should.

Polls have a function, and a value, but not in predicting outcomes. That is more for those who like the excitement of a race, using them as a short-hand to keep score. For me, they are a means of testing hypotheses – of figuring out whether or not one’s gut intuition is reliable. On that score, the polls are doing their job – and I respectfully disagree with them.

Right now, they show a tight horserace between the Tories and Liberals, with the alternating leads falling within the margin of error. When extrapolated into seat counts, the Liberals get on average 10-15 more, owing chiefly to what the political scientists call a ‘more efficient vote’. It is code for the Liberals getting growth in competitive ‘ridings’ (Canuck slang for constituencies) while Tory increases come in areas that they were going to win big in anyway.

While there is still almost a month left, and anything can happen, I am going to boldly (and maybe foolishly) predict that the polls are off and that we are looking at a Tory minority (‘hung’) parliament, with a seat count in the range of 163-168. That is at wide variance with what is currently being estimated, but I think it is possible. If it happens, it would be a seat-for-seat reversal for the Liberals and Conservatives based on what is being estimated.

This is why I think this could happen.

When building a model for a voting population, one has to rely on statistical data on hand – measurable and verifiable. That means building a sample that reflects the demographics of the country. In rough terms, if men aged 18-34 are 25% of eligible voting population, they have to be 25% of your sample, and so on. That doesn’t mean they are actual voters – only that they are legally permitted to show up on polling day and mark an X on a ballot. They are ‘potential’ voters.

In 2011, Stephen Harper won a majority government, and in 2015 lost it to Mr. Trudeau, who grabbed enough to secure a majority of his own. Conventional wisdom says that the Conservative vote collapsed, and yet the difference in total national popular vote for the Tories dropped by about 219,000 votes – a 7.7 percent decline that cost the party 60 seats. By contrast, the NDP lost fewer seats (51) despite having a drop in popular vote that was well over 1 million.

The Trudeau Liberals vaulted from 3rd place to majority status on the strength of an increase in their vote in the range of 4.2 million more voters than in 2011. Of course, if you’re doing the math, you know that if the Liberals took every lost Tory and NDP vote, that still leaves a gap of a little over 2.9 million extra votes unaccounted for.

So, where did all those people come from?

The number to bear in mind is 17.4. This number was key to making Mr. Trudeau Prime Minister, and any decrease to that number changes the math dramatically. It’s a percentage and represents the change in voter turnout from 2011 to 2015, but not for the entire electorate. It applies specifically to one demographic – the 18-34-year olds – millennials. (Graph below)



Those aged 18 to 34 turned out in numbers that were wholly out of keeping with past elections. While many other demographics were up, such as over 65’s who were up about 7%, it was the millennial vote that took off like a rocket. As younger voters generally skew Liberal, this increase had a powerful impact on both the popular vote and the seat count. In short, he was exceedingly effective in converting potential voters into actual voters.

But it’s a double-edged sword.

The 18 to 34-year old demographic views politics differently, but not in the way you think. We get so used to pin pointing stances on individual issues that we commit the error of 'not seeing the forest for the trees.'

Think in terms of 'abstract' versus 'practical'. The abstract group views issues largely in terms of theoretical constructs. That is, they are more ideological. While not partisan, they do subscribe to labels like 'liberal' and 'conservative' in a more holistic fashion. It's a way of life, a lens through which one views the world.

Practical voters are not necessarily partisan either, but they view the world in terms of immediate concerns. There may be a 'unified general theory of society' running in the background, but if their political GPS is going to direct them into a farmer's field, they will drive on instinct and ignore the gadget on their dashboard.

Young voters are abstract, while older voters are practical. One worries about whether they will be able to survive twenty years from now, while the other worries whether they will be able to survive until their next pay day.

Abstract voters are naturally driven by big ideas, and big personalities. Justin Trudeau is, admittedly, the perfect avatar for abstract voters. It is less about policies and more about lifestyle, a kind of culture. It is about the 'brand'. This is not to suggest that abstract voters are not serious people – they are – but they are more about the ‘macro-ideology.’

Practical voters have some affinity for this, but they are more concerned with the fine print and the price. They've spent years dealing with how to make pay cheques cover housing, transportation, food and raising children. Life has made them cynical, as it does all of us at some point. They are ‘micro-ideological’. They will join on the journey to the New Jerusalem so long as there is a job and a place to live when they get there.

The polls reflect two things – ‘eligible’ voters (share of the general population), and ‘likely’ voters (those who are predicted to actually show up). Census data can give you the first number, but for the second one, you have to rely on the past, and that includes the last election where one demographic saw a huge spike.

If you look at historical data, for the 18-34 age group, you find that since 1965 there were only two times that their turnout was high - the last election under Justin Trudeau (first graph above), and the period between 1972 and 1980, under his father. The 1984 election which brought Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservatives in with the largest majority in Canadian history saw the participation rate for that group drop off a cliff, while the group of voters aged 55 and older saw a respectable increase (Graph below).[i]



Trudeau Senior kept his brand intact, but it was the consequence of economic decline, massive deficits and a decade of power (notwithstanding the Joe Clark interregnum) that tipped the scale. Trudeau Junior does not have a dramatically bad economy, but it is bad in key areas - and he has the deficits.

The real question is whether or not he still has the brand.

If he does, and the abstract ‘meta-ideology / world view’ holds, then 18 to 34-year olds will come out in similar numbers. But the Trudeau brand has to contend with at least three instances of brownface / blackface, the SNC Lavalin controversy, the treatment of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, as well as former Ministers Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott. And the 18 to 34-year old voting demographic is the most volatile, being the most reactionary to negative campaigning and ‘inauthentic’ behaviour.

In short, as quickly as that group turned out for him in 2015, they can also turn away just as fast. And if that demographic is disillusioned enough to shift to the NDP or Greens – or just stay home – seat counts shift wildly.

This says nothing of the older demographic that may feel that the combination of virtue-signaling, lack of probity and declining economic prospects incentivizes coming out in good numbers.
Do not think that the parties do not understand this. Look at how each of them has framed their narratives and you can tell that they are trying to firm up their ground. Trudeau is campaigning on the macro-message (the awkwardly constructed “Choose Forward”) while the Tories are playing the micro-message (“It’s time for you to get ahead”). The NDP may very well have the perfect message, even if their policies are not great – “In it for you”. It is the perfect marriage of the macro and micro. Big picture enough for the idealistic, but immediate enough to answer individual concerns.

It won’t be enough to make Jagmeet Singh Prime Minister, but it’s enough to give Justin Trudeau issues. This says nothing of the far more substantive reputation of the Green Party when it comes to the climate change issue. The Prime Minister can try to ‘out green’ the Greens, but it is a strategy that would have very limited success.

In terms of the main contest for government, when the Liberals talk of cuts by provincial Conservative governments, they are trying to undermine the Tory message with ‘practical’ voters. When the Tories talk about scandals and instances of implied hypocrisy, it’s aimed squarely at shaking the ‘abstracts’. 

The best that the Liberals can hope for is some peripheral pickup of Conservative support or convince older voters to stay home. For the Tories, the options are greater, as they can simply nudge Liberal supporters to either the NDP or Greens, in addition to sitting this one out. A more volatile demographic with a low tolerance for negative campaigning and hypocritical actions, and with more options and alternatives to voting for the Liberals – this is the dynamic that doesn’t get captured fully in the polls – or at least the ones you can read for free on a news site.

And so, my unscientific gut feeling is that the people who want to punish Trudeau have more incentive - and alternatives - than those who want to keep him. I believe that millennial voter turnout will drop to more traditional levels and that older voters will come out at the rate they’ve been coming for years.

A quarter of the Canadian House of Commons will likely be decided on marginal votes, so if this scenario happens, the polls could be very wrong. Of course, 2019 could be a repeat of 2015 and this whole article would have been a waste of your time and mine.

October 22nd will reveal which is true.



[i] Source: "Youth Voter Turnout in Canada," Library of Parliament, 13 October 2016, https://bdp.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/2016104E#a5

Friday, February 16, 2018

Thoughts on 'Fake News'



Classic movies are, admittedly, an acquired taste.

In this era of IMAX, Dolby Surround sound number whatever, CGI and pyrotechnics, an old black and white film from the 1930’s or 40’s doesn’t do much to capture attention. But I appreciate the slower pace, the crafting of the dialogue, as well as the use of shadow. Back in the day, when you didn’t have special effects, that is what you relied on, and I appreciate the artistry of it.

As you can imagine, I am often tuned to the Turner Classic Movies channel, or TCM. Because it is commercial free, they fill the gaps between movies with interviews, classic short films, and some original content.

Every now and then, though, you see something that gets you thinking about today. It’s not always a clear lesson, but something puts your mind to a useful analogy for our times.

Every so often, they air what can only be described as a ‘short documentary’ on ‘Letterboxing.’ As a classic film buff, I found it interesting. As a political person, I found it strangely revealing.

‘Letterboxing’ is a term that refers to the shape of the viewing screen. As with its namesake, the shape is more rectangular. Often, when you see a film broadcast in letterbox, or from a blu-ray disc, there is black space at the top and bottom of the screen.

Many of the films that are presented in letterbox format are ones where the imagery is on a more expansive scale – think the classic chariot scene in Ben-Hur with Charlton Heston, or David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. In these films, the use of background is just as important as the action between the main actors. To appreciate the context of what you see between the protagonists, you need to also have an appreciation of their situation. The chariot scene in the former needs a large colosseum, replete with crowds, pageantry and grandeur. To understand the overwhelming nature of the desert in the latter film, you need to see just how small the people are against it.

Today’s blockbusters owe a great deal to the skill of those directors and cinematographers who pioneered the concept of the ‘larger than life’ film. While ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ had many of these elements, the genre really started to come into its own in the early 1950s.

Just as Hollywood was beginning to develop Cinemascope and Vistavision and all sorts of larger scale cinematography, television was also coming into its own. Studios saw the opportunity to have their films broadcast for the home audience, which was good for both the studios and the networks. There was, however, a catch. 

Televisions of the 1950’s and 1960’s had square screens and not the greatest quality resolution. Taking a film like ‘The Ten Commandments’ and putting it on a black and white analog television whose screen was barely larger than a laptop computer was not an easy process. It was fitting a rectangular peg into a square hole, and it would not work without some adaptation.

The workaround was something called ‘pan and scan’. While the layperson might not have known what that was, it was the reason why some television broadcasts and VHS tapes used to carry the disclaimer at the beginning that what you were about to see was ‘formatted to fit your screen.’

‘Formatting’ is a rather innocuous term for what was really a major reworking of a film. You would look at the film in its unadulterated state, isolate a square of the image that, in the opinion of the editor, captured the essence of the action, ignore the rest and magnify the part you intended to keep.

The TCM short presentation (accessible via YouTube from this link) visually demonstrates the phenomenon well. With graphics, they play scenes from Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Gigi, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. You see both the pan and scan version, which is silhouetted in a square, as well as the rest of the scene that would not be used. After seeing what is done, it is hard to disagree with director Martin Scorcese when he argues that ‘pan and scan’ is nothing less than ‘re-directing the film’.

Other directors in the short, such as Michael Mann and Sydney Pollack, explain that a scene is a composition, with every person and thing on camera meant to convey the story. Change the view, and you change the narrative. By way of illustration, an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ is shown subject to ‘pan and scan’, where the square contains Jesus and no more than two disciples to either side of him.

The short documentary appealed to my interest as a film buff, but I believe that its subject matter has import beyond that substrata of the public who are fans of the films of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains. 

As a politically active person, I have had opportunity to see this phenomenon in another place – in the coverage of news events.

Years ago, I attended a political convention in Hamilton, Ontario that was covered by various newspapers. There was one plenary session I attended where the subject was that of ending automatic delegateships for executive members of concordant groups. 

Under the rules, youth executives, campus executives, women’s executives, business supporters, etc. could send their executive members to conventions – including leadership votes. When you consider that each body could have upwards of 20 or more executive members, the collective number of automatics could be as high as 150 or 200. In contrast, no one riding association could send more than ten delegates to a vote.

The argument to change the rules was driven by a desire to ensure that local constituencies, and not specialized executives, were driving the process. If one looks back to the last US Democratic Party primary race, and the perceived role of ‘superdelegates’ influencing the outcome, you get a sense of where a lot of people’s minds were at.

There were, of course, people who argued against the move. They sincerely felt that while the goal was laudable, it might have the unintended consequence of marginalizing members for whom these associated groups were created to represent.

In the end, we voted to end the automatic delegateships. Being a young university student, I was a member of two of these groups, but supported the change. I felt that if the party stood or fell on how well it did in winning ridings, then ridings needed to be at the core of the organization.

I left Hamilton for home, and thought nothing more of my vote until the following Monday, and a column in the Globe and Mail. The columnist wrote about that particular plenary session at that convention. After reading the content of the 500 or so words that encapsulated the debate, I wondered whether or not I had actually been in the room, or if it was one of those strange out of body, parallel universe moments. The date, the location and the title of the event jived with my recollection, but nearly everything else sounded quite strange. According to the account, it was a much livelier and heated affair than I remembered, and my real motivation for supporting the motion was not what I had thought.

People often remember things uniquely and subjectively, and to suggest that my memory was completely devoid of bias would be a stretch, but even accounting for subjectivity, the account of the event should have been roughly approximate to the recollection of a participant.

Was the reporter wrong? Not totally. It would be hard to argue that of a room with more than 400 people, there wasn’t at least a dozen that would have harboured the views that were conveyed in the piece. On the other hand, it is an equally untenable position that the view presented in that Globe and Mail column was shared by all present, right down to the kind folks running the AV equipment.

Of course, I would notice it, though.

The event was like a motion picture. I had experienced it in glorious IMAX, with Dolby Surround sound and all the enhancements that a James Cameron or a George Lucas could embed in it. What I read in the newspaper was the equivalent of the same film on a small black and white screen, mono sound, ‘panned and scanned’ in order to isolate certain characters at the expense of the rest of the frame. It wasn’t technically ‘wrong’, but it was a suggestive narration.

Today, you cannot go five minutes without being treated to an allegation or complaint about 'fake news', but is it really?

'Fake' suggests a falsehood or fabrication - something patently untrue. 'Fake' is when you say you're sick when you are not, when you say something works when it is broken, and vice versa. Fake is when you say that something is ten miles to the east, when it is actually 100 miles to the west. If we interpret ‘fake news’ to be ‘news that is fake’, then yes – there is ‘fake news’ circulating as we speak. 

On the other hand, strictly speaking, by that same measure, not all 'fake news' is actually 'fake'. A car accident can be described as either 'major' or 'horrific', but it's not technically fake unless there was no accident to begin with.

My point is that this issue has always been with us. We just seem to notice it more.
Unfortunately, it is also unavoidable.

When the responsibility of conveying events to the broader public, and committing them as a matter of record, is left to a handful of individuals, and those recollections are subject to the editorial policies of an even smaller group, you will always incur the danger of getting a story that takes a particular point of view or perspective. It cannot be helped.

When you read or see a recount of an event, you are reading or watching what the communicator has deemed important. The camera points in one specific direction for an extended period of time to the exclusion of other concurrent events, or the article contains two paragraphs about a single aspect of the story, and gives one sentence to another.

Truth be told, there have always been aspects of reportage that have been questioned on veracity. Crack open a history book, or do a little investigation, and you will find that newspapers has often taken a slant. In the early days of the American republic, rival publications skewered John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in equally lurid measure, much based on rumour and supposition. In the lead up to Canadian confederation, George Brown – the chief political rival of Sir John A. Macdonald – also helmed the Toronto Globe, and its editorial policy reflected that philosophical bent.

Closer to our time, one could consider the rather pro-active editorial policy of William Randolph Hearst which, some suggest, drove public sentiment during the Spanish-American War, and also creating a legend around the exploits of future President Theodore Roosevelt and his ‘Rough Riders.’ In Britain, one can also look at the policy of discretion employed by press barons during the 1930’s as it related to the coverage of King Edward and Wallis Simpson.

Today in Canada, various large newspapers – the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the Postmedia chain of papers – are routinely accused of favouring one side over another. One paper declares the glass to be half full, while another decries that it is half empty, and yet another questions why it has to be a glass to begin with?

There have been a number of fine journalists and commentators, editors and publishers, but to suggest that there was some mythological golden era of news would be a stretch.

Think about yourself, and how you interpret events in your personal life – at home, at school, or at work. How do you recount the who, what, when, where and why? Would someone else with first-hand knowledge tell it exactly the same way?

There are those who blame social media for the rise of ‘fake news.’ They are correct, but not in the way they think. Social media, instantaneous information, and the 24-hour news cycle means we are exposed to more – more content and from more sources. Each one of those sources is, like a movie production, going to record the action from a particular vantage point.

Individual editors control the camera angle from their specific piece of equipment, but the consumer gets to see the film from all the cameras. In many ways, we have all become the director.

In the proverbial ‘good old days’, when there was only one vantage point, there was no opportunity to compare and contrast. It was an argument over who made the best cup of coffee in a town with only one restaurant. But, as more and more competition has been introduced, and there are more blends of coffee to be had, the choice naturally evolves.

The change in how news is reported has been no less dramatic, and the effect of competition no less profound. In truth, like most revolutionary change, it is neither wholly good nor bad. We have seen a proliferation of voices and perspectives, which has been a positive. We have also seen the decline of professional news gathering organizations in favour of the citizen blogger, whose own perspective may not be any better than that of the reporter they compete with. Quantity is no reflection of quality.

In the end, like the ‘pan and scan’ editing of classic films, the news we consume is unavoidably edited – for length, for content and emphasis, as well as perspective. It has always been that way. We only notice it because today’s story comes to us in many versions, and often competing with one another - like siblings arguing that it was the other one who spilled the juice on the kitchen floor, or broke the vase on the living room table.

So what is to be done?

The promise of more and more information does not make your life easier, but harder and more complicated. And quantity is not a harbinger of quality either. You have more and more voices, but not all of them are professional, diligent in their conduct, or even attempting to be neutral in their narrative.

The answer is, unfortunately, a paradox. The easier that information can be obtained, the harder you need to work to - politely speaking – separate the wheat from the chaff. Imagine people promising a system that will allow you to go paper-free, only to find that your office doubled its supply order and your recycling bin needs to be dumped twice as often!

That’s not easy. Even with a degree in political studies, I confess that I work up a sweat trying to dig up more information on stories I see, comparing write-ups and looking for similarities. I’m not sure how you do it if someone in an ivory tower didn’t give you the short-hand to break the code. 

In the end, though, the answer may just lie in the two things we are all born with from day one – innate curiosity, and a desire to know the truth. How we use it can be trained and honed, but it’s a gift each and every one of us has.

We just have to use it a little more often than we used to.