Bricker is afraid of losing his Liberal contracts. The numbers and methodology are fudged.
Good choice. Now we just have to convince the other 199 blogs out there to do the same thing.
Deifenbaker once said "dogs know what to do with polls".
I agree fully.
Harper's still smiling. I suspect the cheques are still coming in, which is a much better indicator, doncha think?
". So this blog is officially a poll-free zone until January 23."
Jolly good show, Adam!
Adam: thanks for the shout-out.
As for Bricker, I don't think he's ever been really good at reading polls. That aside, what you're questioning is whether his interpretation is correct, not whether the point estimates are correct. And who knows about those? He probably pulled a bad sample; the one in twenty. But I think we can all agree that he is freelancing on the results.
For good polling, check out Innovative Research Group's online panel with Maclean's magazine. (Admittedly, a shameless plug for the firm I work for part-time, as well as for the next wave in polling).
One more thing: everyone should untie their panties, as the margins on the Ontario sample are huge (5.4%). The real difference between the Conservatives and Liberals could only be 9 points.
Don't give up on polls, Adam. They're not magic, and not always a dog's breakfast. They just need to be read with the proper cautions, like all other political prognostications.
Ok, if it was only one poll showing this I wouldn't be worried - but every single poll is showing the same thing. The Tories are not moving nationally, and the Liberals are making steady gains. I'm at a loss. However, I'm rather lose the election on the great, honest campaign Harper is running now then winner on the dirty and cheap Liberal one. And I still think there will be a big Conservative shift come Jan. 23rd!
Thank you!
BBS: more Bloging Tories should ignore, or even better, sabotage, political polls. I find the whole idea of sabotaging polls very empowering. Where can we sign up?
PL: "They just need to be read with the proper cautions, like all other political prognostications."
And Bayesian analysis. Don't forget teh Bayesian analysis 
I asked 412 fellow conservatives what they thought of your post... I'm sorry I can't share the results....
...For good polling, check out Innovative Research Group's online panel with Maclean's magazine....
I find it really interesting that IRG doesn't list any names of the individuals who are behind this company. I see that it's issued a whole bunch of reports together with the Dominion Institute. So I'm wondering; how many tax dollars did the Dominion Institute get this year to perform it's independent research/polling? And I see a John Wright from Ipsos-Reid is on Dominion's advisory board. Isn't he one of Ipso's Senior Vice-Presidents?
Good polling? Independent? Sure!
JM: Legitimate question. IRG is a private polling firm, and their managing director is a former chief of staff to more than one PC premier/party leader, and has worked on more than 45 conservative campaigns.
Also, if you looked at the Dominion site you'd see that most of the their money is private as well.
Normally I don't waste my time on these wank-fests, but this time I couldn't resist.
Whether you talk about polls or not is your choice, and so is sticking your head in the sand. Tories lose when they pretend this is some kind of an intellectual quest. It's not. It's about winning an election. Polls are market intelligence and elections are all about building a winning coalition through marketing. Only a fool would ignore them. Mulroney knew that, Harris knew that, and if he's smart, Harper knows it too.
But the real reason I'm writing is that you're misrepresenting my comments in the NP. To set the record straight, what I said was that Harper is seen by an important proportion of voters in Ontario as having a hidden agenda that has content similar to the Mike Harris agenda. NOT that Mike Harris had a hidden agenda.
I think Mikes Harris' common sense revolution was initially popular, but eventually the public turned against it. When you have all the special interest groups on the left going on about how awful it was, it was only a matter of time before the public would turn against it. Besides I think Mike Harris' biggest mistake was he ran too much on ideology and less on pragmatism. Much of what he did was the right thing, but he came across as being an ideologue. If you want to get elected in Canada and stay in power, never run on ideology, since most Canadians don't subscribe to any particular ideology. On private health care, it is true Canadians are more open to the idea, but one must be careful here. Most European countries that have parallel private systems still heavily regulate the private system so even though you don't have a government monopoly, you don't either have a free market health care system.
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