Everything You Know About This Election is Wrong

Bringing you a much-needed modicum of reality while coalition cacophony hits the stratosphere.

All that's certain about Monday is that people will vote, and then the Governor General will find someone who can command the confidence of the House of Commons. Any other projections are guesswork, proclaims the Ottawa Citizen's Dan Gardner. “The hardest phrase for anyone to say is 'I don't know.' And when you're a pundit on television paid to deliver insta-analysis, it's close to impossible,” Gardner writes. Humans are hardwired to construe narratives out of scattershot data and to look back at their previous predictions and inflate their accuracy even though “there is heaps of theory to explain why attempting to predict the political future beyond one's nose is a fool's errand.” Throwing a dart at a board divided into the manifold post-election scenarios would be more worthwhile.

And that self-assuredness leads to unforeseen consequences, explains Alice Funke, the author of Pundits' Guide, in the National Post. ThreeHundredEight.com, a website that performs seat projections, predicted in February that the NDP would lose 16 seats in an election. That projection was splayed across the front page of The Globe and Mail, puffed up Liberal ambitions, and shaped the narrative that this election would be a race between the Grits and Tories with the NDP fading away. “Indeed one could say that this one blog ... was responsible for the mass failure of the Ottawa punditocracy to foresee either the NDP’s willingness to or interest in voting down the budget at the end of March,” Funke says. And we all know how that turned out.

With that in mind, it's heartening that one columnist, The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson, admits that he, the press gallery, and the better part of Parliament Hill were flat out wrong about writing off the NDP. “Pollsters have now caught the shift, but none of them considered an NDP surge likely before the campaign,” says Simpson. “Nor did we, in the political media, see anything like this coming. We were caught as unawares as everyone else – starting right here, it should be said.” Let's hope he and his colleagues don't forget that lesson the next time a writ is dropped.