Pollsters as the voice of doom

OAKVILLE, ONT.—When you’re working on a political campaign that’s in trouble, the last person you want to hear from is your pollster. After all, you might know intellectually things aren’t going well for your side, but emotionally you harbour hopes that things might still somehow turn around, that you might still—despite all the odds—miraculously snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Call it the “Hail Mary Pass” syndrome. But pollsters don’t deal in hope; they deal in cold, calculated numbers. So, when a pollster crunches those numbers, he or she can sometimes report something that’ll crush your soul, i.e., your candidate is inevitably going to lose, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s all over. In other words, a pollster can be the voice of doom. And sometimes a pollster can project doom pretty far into the future. One time, for instance, I was working on a political campaign where the pollster predicted our defeat a full five weeks before election day. As you might imagine, it was difficult to go to work each and every single day for those five weeks knowing you were fighting for a lost cause. Mind you, it’s much tougher for candidates who know they’ll lose, because in public they still must put on a brave face, displaying optimistic confidence, as they tell their supporters at campaign rallies, 'don’t believe the polls, victory is near'. Interestingly, there was one exception to this. Back in the 2018 Ontario provincial election, a few days before the campaign ended, then-premier Kathleen Wynne stunned the province when she openly admitted her Liberals were going to lose. That’s like throwing a Hail Mary pass to the wrong end zone! Anyway, Wynne urged Ontarians to vote Liberal just to ensure the Progressive Conservatives were held to a minority government. It didn’t work, as the PCs ended up with a massive majority, but it was, nonetheless, an intriguing ploy. Of course, there’s a much different dynamic at work when, well ahead of an election, a pollster tells a president or prime minister that his or her political cause is doomed. In such a case, there are only two options: fight the election anyway and go down in a blaze of glory, or step aside in the hopes that your successor can achieve victory. Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, for example, chose the latter option. Recall that earlier this year, Ardern, who was once New Zealand’s most popular politician, resigned her office, saying she "no longer had enough in the tank,” and that she wanted to spend more time with her family. Yet, it’s also true that her approval numbers in the polls had been on a precipitous and steady decline, leading me to conclude that her pollster told her in no uncertain terms that she couldn’t win. This leads me to wonder about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. What are his pollsters telling him? We know from all the public opinion polls getting splashed about in the media that Trudeau seems to be in trouble, and that (as of this writing) he’s lagging behind Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, so naturally it’s tempting to think his pollsters are indeed telling him he has no chance. If that’s the case, Trudeau might soon follow Ardern’s lead and go for a “walk in the snow.” But, on the other hand, pollsters aren’t always the voice of doom. Sometimes their cold, calculated numbers can provide a theory for winning, even if it’s an against the odds long-shot. So maybe Trudeau’s pollsters have devised such a theory, and thus are giving him hope. Gerry Nicholls is a communications consultant. The Hill Times