Grenier - Tapping into the Pulse: Political Public Opinion Polling in Canada, 2013

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Copyright 2014 ric Grenier, all rights reserved.

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Paul Adams

It must have been sometime in 2008. I was working at EKOS Research and the boss, Frank Graves, asked me, Who is this ric Grenier?

Grenier had popped up, seemingly from nowhere, asking surprisingly detailed questions about the methodology of our polls.

The reason that was unexpected was that while more and more political polls are published in the media every year, the scrutiny to which they are subjected is less than it has ever been, at least in my experience. And therein lies a story.

Polls have been an important, if controversial, part of our political landscape ever since they came along. With the dawn of the mass franchise, the old less formal political technique of tracking the electorate through human networks of local bosses with local knowledge proved inadequate. Parties and politicians searched for increasingly systematic tools to plumb the minds of the electorate, many of them borrowed from commercial market research. And the media naturally did so too.

In the United States, the Literary Digest magazine had experimented with predicting the presidential elections of the 1920s and 1930s, distributing literally millions of questionnaires and relying on people to mail in the completed forms. The survey results often came within one per cent of the actual national vote on election day. However, using the same method in 1936 the magazine wrongly predicted a win by the Republican Alf Landon. This was no doubt in part because magazine subscribers during the Depression were not particularly representative of the population and likely skewed away from poorer voters, for example, who were more likely to vote Democrat. Using more scientific methods, George Gallup correctly predicted that Franklin Roosevelt would be re-elected in 1936 based on just a thousand interviewsa fraction of what the Literary Digest had collected.

By the time of the Second World War, both Britain and Canada had branches of their propaganda machines actively sounding opinions among the public. George Gallup worked both sides of the street, signing up a chain of Canadian newspapers to publish his polls, but also contracting to do secret work for the government on wartime issues. On one occasion, the government prevailed on him to suppress polling intended for publication that revealed the depth of divisions among Canadians over conscription.

Of course, Gallup and other American pollsters famously got the 1948 election of Harry Truman wrongnot necessarily because of defects in their methods but likely because they stopped polling too soon and failed to catch a late shift in the electorate.That led to the famous photograph of Harry Truman holding a copy of the