Juno News - November 04, 2020


Should Canadians be skeptical of the polls？


Episode Stats

Length

5 minutes

Words per Minute

230.70007

Word Count

1,283

Sentence Count

1

Misogynist Sentences

2


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 well if we've learned anything from last night's american election it is possibly that the old
00:00:11.220 adage polls are for dogs really is accurate especially in the united states now many of
00:00:16.340 the pollsters were predicting a biden cakewalk that biden was going to take this he was going
00:00:20.740 to pass probably 300 electoral college votes that the democrats were going to make gains in the house
00:00:25.180 and the senate and it was just going to be a blue wave so to speak or at the very very least a
00:00:29.980 strong strong biden victory they got it completely wrong just like they did in 2016 now there's a
00:00:35.440 number of reasons for this number one is probably that many conservatives feel it's not okay to share
00:00:40.420 your political beliefs with uh you know with people in real life or at work because that can lead to
00:00:45.520 actual real life consequences there have been a number of stories of people getting fired people
00:00:50.020 having uh you know problems with their families or just having other real life issues because they've
00:00:54.320 outed themselves as a conservative or a trump supporter or they've just been very very active
00:00:58.420 on you know second amendment or some other traditionally conservative issue or republican
00:01:02.300 issue and that has caused them actual real life problems second is that when people were called
00:01:07.980 or phoned for a poll and asked who they would like to vote for there was this sort of idea that many
00:01:11.940 people were playing uh the world's greatest dad joke and saying that they would actually vote for
00:01:15.500 biden but they really intended to vote for donald trump and so people intentionally lying to pollsters
00:01:19.880 was sort of funny for many people because of the uh the shock i think that happened in 2016
00:01:24.420 where the chances of hillary winning were like 90 something crazy percent 90 something percent
00:01:28.740 and uh i think everyone was in shock i think many trump supporters were even in a big shock
00:01:32.600 that he won that election and so there's that idea and there's many other reasons why you know
00:01:37.680 there's there's the fact that people don't have the same landline you can't grab them during dinner
00:01:41.060 you gotta maybe contact them online there's many many factors as to why polling might be wrong but
00:01:46.580 what about canada do we tend to see the same same kind of results in canada well a little bit
00:01:51.680 different we don't have the same american culture but the pollsters let's have a quick snapshot of
00:01:55.920 this the pollsters this is from a cbc poll tracker story and it shows their sort of average these are
00:02:01.800 the election results now this is by the popular vote so this is not the number of seats or you know
00:02:06.480 we don't have an electoral college but this is the the popular vote on the top the actual final results
00:02:11.560 and this is the polling that was predicted now you can see here that a lot of the um pretty much
00:02:18.460 every poll here has the liberals winning except for you know very very small handful but they all
00:02:23.100 have the liberals winning or very strong and even the ones that don't have the liberals up here you
00:02:28.560 know you can see here's this one from angus reid had the conservatives up that doesn't necessarily
00:02:32.820 mean that they would get the most seats because of the way that the seats are concentrated with the
00:02:37.500 seats are spread out and uh if you look at the the wikipedia page which has the nice results here
00:02:41.780 for the 2019 election um you can see the andrews here actually did get more popular vote although he
00:02:46.600 he did not obviously get the most amount of seats at 157 for the liberals to 121 at the time for the
00:02:52.160 conservatives so polling in canada tended to be a bit better but what should we do how should we think
00:02:58.600 about polling well number one anytime you read things from pollsters you want to be skeptical because
00:03:04.600 you don't necessarily know the methodology you don't necessarily know the sample size you don't
00:03:08.600 know maybe it was all weighted down in toronto maybe it was all weighted down out in the west maybe it
00:03:13.880 was all weighted down by certain demographic these are all things that could skew a poll
00:03:17.460 and give you an unfair or misrepresentation of what is actually going on and that is very important
00:03:22.960 because the media is going to pick up on that and they will talk about that that will start to form
00:03:28.100 part of the narrative so when you have for example poll after poll after poll talking about justin
00:03:32.320 strauss winning people just start believing that he's going to win that is one of the factors that
00:03:36.100 can actually make that happen by people's behavior either stopping conservatives from going to the polls
00:03:40.020 or you know making sure that liberals actually do get out and go to the polls so the ways in which we
00:03:45.500 talk about it can also skew the actual results and so polling in and of itself should always be taken
00:03:50.600 with a grain of salt it's it's good to maybe do them because you definitely want to know especially
00:03:55.240 if you are interested in running for office or you're you know you're actually running for office
00:03:59.680 you want to know sort of where the barometer is sitting on a number of issues and so that is
00:04:03.700 definitely a good thing to do but polls should always be taken with a grain of salt now
00:04:08.600 ultimately the only poll that really matters is the election day result that's really the only
00:04:14.200 thing people are coming they're voting you're getting one vote per person and again we're
00:04:18.680 excluding any shenanigans or funny business we're just talking about the system itself how it's
00:04:22.820 supposed to work getting one vote per person and so ultimately that's the only way that you're going
00:04:27.900 to know who wanted who to be the leader again you know you can have questions about the democratic
00:04:32.180 system that we're using or compare it to some other system first past the post or mixed member
00:04:37.060 proportionality or you know some direct voting by popular vote but again ultimately that is the
00:04:43.200 only poll that does matter because that is going to decide who gets to be elected and who is going
00:04:47.860 to be the leader of the country whether it's canada america or any other country that has a function
00:04:52.220 of democracy so a lot of stuff to think about really interesting i'm really curious to see what
00:04:56.960 polling for the next canadian election is going to be some of the provincial uh elections coming up
00:05:01.740 what are the polling what is the polling going to be like and uh you know what do you guys think do
00:05:05.720 you feel that uh you would give the same answers to a pollster right are there some issues that uh
00:05:10.700 might make you shy about you know saying that you are a strong conservative a strong liberal or a strong
00:05:14.720 any peer would there be some reason why you would not tell the truth you know what do you guys think
00:05:18.900 i'd be really curious to hear what you have to think in the comments so for true north i am sam
00:05:23.300 ashkenazi thank you so so much for watching this video uh still haven't found out who the president is but
00:05:27.880 possibly by the time you watch it we will already know who the next president of the united states
00:05:32.040 is so thank you so much and have yourselves a great