Ontario: Which Of Ipsos, Abacus, Mainstreet Is Correct?

Polling Takes

So, if you believe two of today’s polls of Ontario – namely, Abacus and Ipsos - the Ontario PC momentum has cooled, the Ontario Liberals have spiked to 32%, and we’re looking at a minority parliament. Run Abacus through my projection, and I’d have the PCs on 53 seats, 10 short of majority government, and the Liberals easily forming some form of government.

If you believe Mainstreet, the PCs at a hair short of 40%, the Liberals are in the mid 20s, and the Tories would be in the mid-70s in seats, per my projection on that poll alone.

And I’m getting the most intense déjà vu to August 2021, because once again, Mainstreet has freelanced into the valley of pro-Tory results and I have to reckon with whether they’re right.

“Meet me on the road/Meet me where I said/Blame it all upon/A rush of blood to the head”

My enduring legacy of the 2021 Canadian Election campaign is not any of the columns I wrote, it’s not the fact I was successful, it’s not any of that. The enduring legacy is the place that Coldplay’s A Rush Of Blood To The Head now holds in my heart, a song I have long enjoyed and liked, and have for less time loved. I love it because in the seat of that campaign, it was a motif – for my fiction writing, and for my understanding of the world.

So much of that Canadian campaign was about whether everyone’s panic was just that – a rush of blood to the head, to be forgiven once the heat and emotion of a campaign or a crisis has passed. If those panicking had been correct, and had the Tories ever had a path to power federally last year, then obviously it wouldn’t have been a rush of blood to the head, it would have just been sanity. Fortunately for my reputation, I was right.

But what does it all mean as we have to go for Round 2 on this merry-go-round, as Mainstreet once again has numbers that are just fundamentally at odds with the consensus? I have no idea, and that’s what’s so fucking exhausting right now.

…

Let’s have two conversations about the polls, and Mainstreet, and bias.

Is Mainstreet wrong? and Am I hoping Mainstreet’s the one wrong because I hate Doug Ford? are, fundamentally, two different questions, but the answer to the latter informs what you think of my answer to the former.

Is Mainstreet wrong? Probably. Am I hoping Mainstreet’s the one wrong because I hate Doug Ford? No fucking shit, and I’m not going to bother pretending that I am not a human being who hates Doug Ford. Do I hate him enough to bias my forecast against him? No, because I like being right more than I dislike DoFo, but the thing about all of this is that this paragraph is the most honest you’ll ever get someone in my job about the biases of the gig.

Clear minded analysis would suggest that if the phone pollster with a history of volatile results before and at the start of writ periods has two polls that show they’re wrong in something close to the same time period, they’re probably wrong.

Clear minded analysis would suggest that Mainstreet’s volatility has increased in recent times, from their federal election period to the Liberal vote jumping up, down, and sideways in the last month in their poll, to their February federal vote intention poll having the PCs at 39% - a mark that would represent a substantial increase on their polling since, what, the Harper era?

And clear minded analysis would also point out that I will look like an idiot if Doug Ford really ends up getting 40% of the vote again (which, I’m sure Mainstreet would appreciate me saying, is their current snapshot, not their prediction for June 2nd), a fact which some will be unable to divorce from my writings now.

And I just don’t care.

When you live on the edge of public humiliation as much as I choose to – when your whole thing is straight talk and no bullshit – you end up in unenviable situations where you have to clarify your mind even when you’re not sure. Indecision from someone like me doesn’t read like earnest uncertainty, it reads like calculation, or weakness – and I hate people misreading my motives more than anything. At the end of the day, the take cycle demands a sacrifice, and it demands its pound of flesh, so here it is.

Is Mainstreet wrong? Probably. Is “probably” certainly? No. Is it any form of guarantee of where we’ll be in a month, let alone election day? God no. Do I still Quito et al over there? With all my heart.

If the motif of the 2021 Canadian campaign was “if I am too cowardly to say in public what I say and believe in private, then nobody should give a damn what I have to say anyways”, it works as a motif for 2022 as well, and that stands here. I think Abacus and Ipsos are right, I think the Liberals are surging, at least a bit, and I think Doug Ford is currently in a minority position, and given a Ford minority can’t exist, I think Steven Del Duca is the frontrunner for Premier of Ontario with six weeks left.

At the end of the day, that’s what I believe. Am I right? I think so - others will disagree, I’m sure. But this is all I got. Let’s just hope I’m not blaming this on a rush of blood to the head.