Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
^ You guys are dreaming. If there was an accurate way to do this I would bet you $100 each that 44% of the people have no idea what a Naheed Nenshi is, never mind are the planning on voting for him.
Before the obvious comments let me say I mean no disrespect by that comment. Most of the other candidates are in the exact same position. Other than the interested and hardcore political junkies most people have never heard of most of these guys! How many people even knew that there was a mayoralty forum last night for example?
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I guess my point is that you could as easily say that 44% of eligible voters
will never have heard of any of the candidates, let alone be motivated enough by one of them to get off their duffs and vote for him/her--and that this will be true until the morning after the election, when they will read the new Mayor's name in the paper over a double-double and maple dip. In fact, the number might be higher. Turnout is so low in municipal elections that polls are sort of meaningless. It's really all about getting out your vote.
Look at it this way: only about 208,000 people voted in the last municipal election. Given that there's no incumbent, we'd expect that we're not going to see a runaway winner like we did last time. It's very likely the case that 30% of the vote will do it, and perhaps even less given the size of the field. Let's, for argument's sake, say that 25% of the vote makes you very competitive. That's only about 50,000 votes in a city of 1 million.
So let's assume that Candidate A has exactly 75,000 supporters, and that (for argument's sake) there are 600,000 eligible voters in Calgary. That candidate (assuming polls that are reasonably accurate) would probably consistently poll at around 12.5%.
But if those 75,000 were
extremely motivated as a group, and two-thirds of them came to the polls on election day, then Candidate A is your new mayor in spite of some very underwhelming poll numbers. They could even outperform a candidate with 90,000 supporters, if those supporters were slightly less motivated and only half turned out at the polls.
In reality, participation numbers are likely to be much lower for every candidate, but my point is this: the X factor in an election with low turnout, no incumbent and a good deal of anti-incumbency sentiment is motivation, and that's something a poll will never tell you. I doubt name recognition matters as much, because people who are less informed are much less likely to vote at all.
In effect, this means that the size of any candidate's poll numbers is unimportant. What matters is the size and efficiency of each candidate's GOTV organization, and whether they are connecting efficiently with their base in a way that motivates their supporters to get out and vote.