Seven polls, two realities, and a surprise that better be monumental

Let’s have beer! Evan and I will be at Big Rig in Gloucester Centre Friday October 2, from 6-6:30 pm (traffic depending). Come see us!

CRIC database that lists polling firms, as we discuss in the first few minutes.

Below is the image the Leiper campaign has of where people have requested lawn signs.

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Transcript

Brigitte Pellerin (00:02): Hi Evan, how are you today?

Evan Potter (00:03): Fine, fine. Again, there’s a briskness in the air, and it’s hard to deny.

Brigitte Pellerin (00:08): Hard to deny — this time it’s coming.

I want to start by saying a great thank you to the viewers and listeners who came to have a beer with us last week at Irene’s Pub in the Glebe. Almost a dozen people showed up, which — for something announced on Twitter at the last minute — I can admit now, I was a little bit scared nobody would come and it would just be you and me having a beer. Which would have been fine, obviously. So we went in with low expectations, and I was blown away. It was lovely to meet people, talk to them, hear them, have those conversations.

So we want to do it again.

Evan Potter (00:49): Come one, come all.

Brigitte Pellerin (00:52): We will be at the Big Rig at Gloucester Centre next Friday — October second. I should have looked at the calendar before announcing it, but yes: Friday, October second.

I’ll try to be there around six-ish, traffic depending. I was a bit sad that I got to Irene’s late — I had a problem with my bike, so I arrived eight minutes late and people were already waiting for us. So I’ll aim for six-ish and announce it on Twitter. And you’ll get there when you get there, after your class, traffic depending. We’re being a little loosey-goosey with the timeline. But we’ll be there, have a beer, and hear what people have to say out in the east end.

Evan Potter (01:32): Absolutely. I love travelling around the wards. I don’t know why I’m so interested in all this stuff, to be honest with you. I’m fascinated, because I want to know what people think. Maybe that’s the inner political scientist in me.

Brigitte Pellerin (01:50): There’s a beautiful series on the CTV Ottawa news site. Leah Larocque went walking around in all twenty-four wards. She talks to people about their concerns, and then she explains the wards a little — where they are, what’s important there. Really interesting, and very well done. Look it up, folks, if you’re interested. Maybe just your ward, or go explore the others.

(02:18) And now, from the sublime to the ridiculous — sorry, I needed a transition, and it’s not always elegant — that polling. What is going on?

Evan Potter (02:26): People have a lot of views on the polling. And I’m going to say that the polling situation right now is an under-reported story by Ottawa’s local media. I’m looking for CBC, CTV, the Ottawa Citizen, whoever else, to have a look at what’s going on.

Brigitte Pellerin (02:53): Do you want to catch people up first on what’s happening?

Evan Potter (02:57): I was thinking about how to address this today, and I’ll keep it as fact-based as I can.

We’ve had seven public polls since April. Liaison Strategies did five of them. Of those five, four reported polling on the mayor’s race — and the August Liaison poll did not release the numbers for the candidates for mayor.

Brigitte Pellerin (03:35): But it talked about other issues, like safety and homelessness. Just not the mayor’s race.

Evan Potter (03:40): Exactly. Then we had Corus Consulting [name to verify] in June — that was poll number six. And most recently, ElectRight [name to verify], reporting from September seventeenth and eighteenth, did a poll. Both of those also included numbers for the candidates for mayor.

Brigitte Pellerin (04:02): I have one question before we move on, and it’s a factual thing.

There’s a group — I forget the name of it — a group of established pollsters. Because everyone can go out and measure things, but polling is actually a science. To be accepted into that group, you presumably have to show you’re a real pollster. Liaison is in that group.

Evan Potter (04:23): Yes, it is. Abacus is in there.

Brigitte Pellerin (04:30): Abacus is in there. Mainstreet Strategy — would they be in there?

Evan Potter (04:34): Mainstreet, yes. They’re all there. All the major pollsters are there, and those who typically do public polls are there.

Brigitte Pellerin (04:45): But not ElectRight. This latest poll.

Evan Potter (04:47): I did not see ElectRight on the members list.

Brigitte Pellerin (04:55): Okay. So if we’re wrong about this, someone can correct us — but you don’t see it on the list that’s publicly available.

Evan Potter (04:55): No, it’s not on CRIC’s member list. As I’ve been told this week, it’s a voter identification firm. And if you go on the website, as a service, it provides public opinion research.

Brigitte Pellerin (05:08): And by highlighting this, I’m not trying to throw shade at them or question their work. I’m just saying there’s a factual difference between the established polling firms — let’s call them that — and other people who do research that can also be polling, but who aren’t recognized established pollsters.

Evan Potter (05:31): Well — they are not the pollsters included in the CRIC membership. I think they would probably say they’re professional pollsters, or that they provide those services.

(05:59) So here’s what I would conclude, without getting into questions of methodology, which will vary from pollster to pollster. Sample sets, weighting averages — all of that will vary from firm to firm.

What I can say is that in all six of the polls in which the mayoral results were released publicly, Mark Sutcliffe was ahead. That’s incontrovertible.

(06:42) And I think intuitively we know that. He’s the incumbent — I always come back to this — he’s the incumbent mayor with no quote-unquote personal scandal attached to him.

To be able to unseat somebody like that — you don’t even have to say Mark Sutcliffe, we’ll just call him the mayor — is incredibly difficult for challengers. The incumbent advantage, and I’ll say it for the next four weeks, is huge. We’re not saying it’s insurmountable. We’re not throwing shade, as you said, on all the many people who are putting aside their personal lives to be challengers. We need that for democracy. But to challenge incumbents, whether at the ward level or the mayoral level, is a huge bar to surmount.

So you would expect Mark Sutcliffe to be ahead, and by all accounts he has been, and probably is as we speak. Now the question is: is he ahead by eight points, ten points, sixteen points?

Brigitte Pellerin (07:35): So what’s the issue, then?

Evan Potter (07:42): We don’t know. But he’s ahead.

Jeff Leiper — if you look across all the polling in terms of committed and leaning, his variation has not been that great. If we were to do a census, which we’re not going to do, it would probably be between twenty-two and twenty-six percent.

Brigitte Pellerin (08:10): Which is his natural base, basically.

Evan Potter (08:11): I like that word you used — natural. You’d say the progressive voting base in Ottawa is probably about that size. So he’s probably capturing it. They have no other place to go. He’s their guy, he’s their candidate.

And of course he’s sharing some of that — we don’t know what percentage — with Neil Saravanamuttoo. I’ve always said the two of them probably take forty percent.

Brigitte Pellerin (08:44): So they would win if there were one guy.

Evan Potter (08:48): They could win if they were one guy. And Neil was always the primary threat to Jeff Leiper’s underdog attempt to unseat Mark Sutcliffe.

Brigitte Pellerin (08:55): Because he’s fishing in the same waters, so to speak. Not that voters are fish.

(09:07) Our viewers are very smart. They’re very well informed. They understand things.

Evan Potter (09:15): So we’re telling people things they already pretty well know. The real question now becomes Alex Lawson. What is his number?

When you have Liaison having him at twenty-six percent — let’s say in the high twenties —

Brigitte Pellerin (09:35): That was in July.

Evan Potter (09:36): In July. And people around town apparently know what the August number was, but it’s not public, and I’m not going to say anything. So we’ll just say mid to high twenties.

And then ElectRight —

Brigitte Pellerin (09:52): Had him at four percent.

Evan Potter (09:52): Four. Or six to seven if you distribute the undecideds. So it’s still single digits. And a huge difference, obviously. A huge swing.

(10:05) Is that a realistic swing in two months? Pollsters would probably say no.

Brigitte Pellerin (10:13): I’ve seen nothing on the campaign trail that would suggest it. He didn’t say something outrageous. Somebody could have a gaffe of such magnitude that people turn away from them — but none of that happened.

Evan Potter (10:31): I don’t know what the sampling set was. There are so many missing pieces to the puzzle here.

Brigitte Pellerin (10:39): Well, we do know some of it. The September one, by ElectRight, had a sample of about six hundred folks.

Evan Potter (10:46): Six hundred — that’s a margin of error of about four.

Brigitte Pellerin (10:50): And it was heavily weighted toward older people, older than fifty-five. And about a third, or a bit more than a third — I forget the exact number — with a household income between a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Which is not everyone.

Evan Potter (11:01): So does that mean they weren’t doing random dialling? The level of probability sampling — well, I won’t get into that.

Brigitte Pellerin (11:14): I don’t know what that means. But that’s the information we do know.

Evan Potter (11:24): We’re not going to cast aspersions on the polling firms here. That’s not our business to do.

We’ll just say that what we need, Brigitte — and I think many observers agree — is a polling firm, call it a name-brand polling firm, to step in in the last four weeks and do a poll.

Brigitte Pellerin (11:47): And show us what they’re seeing.

Evan Potter (11:50): To validate. And things have changed — don’t forget, polling is a snapshot in time. It’s hindsight. Things could obviously change again, and usually do, from mid-September polling to late September and early October polling.

So I would say: no question, Mark Sutcliffe, as the incumbent, as we would expect, is ahead. We don’t know by how much.

(12:20) He’s the presumptive — it’s his election to lose. It has always been his election to lose, as the incumbent. And the question is whether someone like Jeff Leiper can catch up. As I’ve said, we don’t know. Can he go from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties in a month?

Or, alternatively: has the existing polling not picked up what’s actually happening on the ground, because the Leiper campaign is doing so well there? We don’t know. And the problem with that is we won’t know until polling day.

Brigitte Pellerin (13:03): And this is where the problem is. People can say: well, you journalists and commentators love polls because they give you something to talk about. Fair. True.

But it’s also useful. I’m starting to hear now from people who say, okay, there’s an election, I know it’s coming, and I haven’t looked at anything yet — and they ask me what I can tell them in five minutes to help them figure out where things are at. A poll does that for people.

(13:31) When you’re just a person with a life to live, other work to do, kids to take care of, activities and whatnot — you get to the end of your day, it’s seven p.m., and you’re looking at it thinking: do I have a beer, or do I look at the platforms first? So people want a quicker way to at least get a sense of where things are. That’s an independent public poll — or more than one independent public poll, ideally.

Evan Potter (13:53): More than one, of course.

Brigitte Pellerin (13:57): So you can compare them, because they all have different methodologies, different sample sizes, different ways of weighting — and now I’m getting into territory I shouldn’t really talk about, because I’m not competent at it.

But somebody pointed me to this: if you weigh yourself first thing in the morning and then weigh yourself after dinner, which number are you going to take? Which is your real weight? And some polls sometimes want to go with one or the other. I said, well, I’m the morning. I don’t even weigh myself after dinner. I don’t want to know that number.

So you compare that to this, which helped me understand it.

(14:41) But the point is, it helps voters who don’t have a huge amount of time to dive into all the candidates and the platforms and watch all the debates and do the kinds of things we do. It’s a shortcut to what the situation looks like.

(14:54) So if you show the mayor ahead, you’re not surprised — the mayor’s ahead, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t be. That’s fine. But then there are the other guys.

If you’re happy and you want to vote for Mark Sutcliffe again, you don’t need any of this. You’re doing fine. You know what you’re doing. Your job is done — you just have to go and vote. Congratulations, you have the easy job.

But if you don’t want Mark Sutcliffe again, and you just don’t know who among the others you should vote for, that kind of polling information helps you tremendously. This is why you and I have been saying we need more of those numbers. Somebody has to come up with them.

Evan Potter (15:31): Well said, Brigitte.

Polling is about the horse race, and of course it gets media attention because of that. But it also helps people decide, and rank choices, and make strategic decisions among the candidates. They can only do that if they get a fairly accurate ranking of where the candidates are.

People will donate based on momentum — if they think somebody has momentum, they’ll give them more money.

(16:12) And critically, especially at the municipal level, there are volunteers on the ground. These campaigns don’t have the budgets to do the air war. It really is door-knocking. And it’s the ability to mobilize volunteers — you can’t pay them. So the more committed, motivated, energized volunteers you have — and part of that energy is going to come from a sense that your candidate is catching up or has a chance. And the only way you can convey that in a quote-unquote scientific way is to show the polling.

Brigitte Pellerin (16:52): Right. Or campaigns can share their numbers. They have numbers. Behind the scenes they’ll talk to people like you and me and give us a sense of what they’re seeing, and for whatever reason they’re not releasing it publicly, and I respect that.

They can also release, if they want, how much money they’re raising — because that’s a great indication too. And on this one, the Leiper campaign is reasonably, or very, transparent. Do you have their latest number?

Evan Potter (17:20): The Leiper campaign, to their credit, has run an open campaign.

(17:33) They’ve said they now have twenty-six thousand committed voters — meaning people who’ve said they will vote for Jeff Leiper. They’re probably over two hundred and twenty or two hundred and thirty thousand in donations. I don’t know how many volunteers they have on the ground, but I’ve always said they need more — not fifteen hundred, they need thousands of people on the ground.

Brigitte Pellerin (17:58): And they have signs, too. There’s a map — I’ll put a link to it, though we have to be careful not to show people’s addresses — where you can see the properties that have requested a sign. It’s a good map. If I were running their campaign, I’d be happy with that map.

Evan Potter (18:18): To give you a clear example of the challenge for the Leiper campaign: twenty-six thousand people have committed to them. Catherine McKenney’s final vote tally in 2022 was, I think, a hundred and ten thousand, which got them to thirty-eight percent at the time.

So the Leiper campaign has to get four, five times what they have now — at least — just to match Catherine’s vote count four years ago. And they probably have to do better than that to be competitive.

Brigitte Pellerin (18:59): And without spilling secrets — not that I know that many secrets — the campaign is confident they’re on track to achieve that. So we have to say that.

We also have to remind people that the Leiper campaign is promising a big surprise on Monday, September twenty-eighth. We mentioned that last week and said, well, it had better be good. Don’t underwhelm me.

Evan Potter (19:24): The surprise has to be monumental, Brigitte. The surprise has to be a kind of so-and-so is dropping out and joining us surprise. It has to be big.

Brigitte Pellerin (19:38): Because — we have to point out that Mark Sutcliffe had Jean Chrétien, former prime minister, for our younger viewers, show up at the unveiling of his platform for francophones in Ottawa. I’m mangling the exact title. But Jean Chrétien shows up and endorses Mark Sutcliffe. That’s a big one. To the extent that endorsements matter — and maybe they do, for some people.

Evan Potter (19:58): I think certain endorsements certainly matter, and we can say that one’s a good one. And we can say that Mark Sutcliffe has a boatload of endorsements.

(20:15) People aren’t thinking of endorsements at the door, obviously. But for certain communities — and I would assume the francophone community in Ottawa, which is substantial. Is it ten to fifteen percent? It’s not an insubstantial voting bloc.

Brigitte Pellerin (20:27): I think it’s a little bit more — fifteen to seventeen. But I could be wrong.

Evan Potter (20:35): And to have Jean Chrétien endorse the sitting mayor is a powerful message.

We’re just showing people what power the mayor has. He controls the attention economy. He has all these endorsements. He’s been campaigning every day for four years — to use Joanne Chianello’s formulation, which I think is totally accurate.

Brigitte Pellerin (20:47): Because the media will show up to his events. That’s right.

(21:02) Fair enough. They all do it.

Evan Potter (21:04): They all do it. So you combine all those advantages, and it should not come as a surprise that Mark Sutcliffe is ahead in the polls. The shock would be if Mark Sutcliffe were not ahead in the polls.

Brigitte Pellerin (21:19): Although — and again, these are people who talk to me, so this is a self-selecting sample. I’m not the data person; I’m the feelings person. So I get people talking to me.

And the overwhelming feeling I sense among the people who talk to me and ask me questions about the campaign is a generalized lack of enthusiasm about the options available to us as voters. Let’s just keep the four top ones.

It’s difficult for them to make a decision, because nobody really is exciting them just yet. And there’s a lot of same-same — at least, that’s what’s being perceived out there, as far as what people tell me.

Evan Potter (22:02): It’s interesting that you say that, because even the last poll — the ElectRight poll — had the undecideds at twenty-eight percent.

Brigitte Pellerin (22:21): That’s still a big number.

Evan Potter (22:22): It’s still a big number, and it’s an unusually big number. The professional pollsters will tell us what the undecided numbers should typically be a month away from election day. And I know it is not a third. I know for sure that a month away from election day it should be closer to twenty, maybe. Not thirty. Thirty percent is high.

Brigitte Pellerin (22:48): My sense is that when people say they’re undecided, they’ve decided who they’re not voting for. They just don’t know who their alternative is.

That’s not true of everyone — there are always people who literally don’t know who they’re going to vote for. But that percentage is much lower than thirty percent. I think it’s probably half of the current undecided. If twenty-eight is accurate, maybe half of them are mostly telling pollsters, without telling them: I know I don’t want Sutcliffe. I don’t think I want Sutcliffe again. Or they’re not even sure about that, but he’s not really their first choice. They just don’t know what their options are.

Evan Potter (23:27): That’s a good point. They will know who the mayor is. The one person they will know among the candidates is the mayor. And if they’re undecided, it’s clear they are probably not in the mayor’s court.

Brigitte Pellerin (23:42): And this is my favourite question. So if I meet you on the street, folks — or if you come and have a beer with me — be prepared to answer it. Because the question I love asking people, and I don’t argue, I just sit there and listen, is: are you really happy with the way things are right now?

And overwhelmingly the answer is something along the lines of: yeah, it’s kind of — I mean, it could be worse, I guess.

And then I say: are you excited about any of the challengers? Don’t really know them yet. So, no. Nobody has grabbed them. There’s no Mamdani wave so far.

Evan Potter (24:13): There’s no Mamdani effect. So far, no. There won’t be any Mamdani effect here.

Brigitte Pellerin (24:20): Well, a girl can hope.

And then I ask: if there was one issue — what’s your top issue, really? And then it varies. But safety, transit and infrastructure come up a lot.

(24:35) And when I ask folks, well, what about your tax bill, how important is it — then you get, because I hang out with smart people, more detailed discussions. Well, it’s fine to have a low tax bill, but if the streets are falling apart, what’s the point? That’s not okay.

Yes to a low increase in my taxes — but can we do something about the pothole that just cost me three hundred dollars, because I had to replace a wheel?

Evan Potter (25:05): So people are sophisticated enough to make those trade-offs.

Brigitte Pellerin (25:12): It’s interesting to see.

All right — we only have a few minutes left. Before we set up the next beer, because I love having drinks with people: what else are you watching this week? There are debates coming up. Jeff’s surprise. What else?

Evan Potter (25:26): Jeff’s surprise — it’ll be interesting to see the level of surprise.

I attended Neil Saravanamuttoo’s end-of-summer barbecue at Brewer Park. And I just want to say again that Neil looks like he’s having fun.

Brigitte Pellerin (25:49): Good for him. Why not?

Evan Potter (25:50): He’s relaxed. He loves answering the questions. And he’s getting that slice of the Ottawa local municipal voting market who want to talk about infrastructure spending, and opening up the budget process — who want to get into that, call it technical, detail.

Of course Neil is in his element. He’s getting positive attention — the type of attention he wouldn’t be able to get in a five-minute delegation to council or committee. So, good for him.

Brigitte Pellerin (26:30): Good for him, yeah.

I went to a Lawson event last weekend, out in Manotick. There was other media there. I went as my Substack self — I was not writing for the Citizen on this one — but there was also someone from the Citizen doing a profile on him. So we’ll see when that comes out.

(26:55) And I’m going to put them on the spot right now, because they kind of almost agreed to let me shadow Alex on a canvass. I want to follow him around — not in his most natural environment, but in a suburb, or Centretown, or somewhere you wouldn’t think would be his natural place. I want to shadow and hear how people are reacting to him, and what issues they’re talking about with him.

I want to see how that works out. Because the July number at the mid-to-high twenties, and the four percent he’s getting now — one of those is wrong. They cannot both be true.

And I’m curious enough that I want to know which one. This is me not being scientific about it, just my impressions of where I think the number is between those two extremes.

Evan Potter (27:43): We need another pollster to come in — to give a sample size of a thousand and find out what’s going on with regard to Alex Lawson.

Brigitte Pellerin (27:46): Yes, I know. And in the meantime, you’ll have to deal with me, I guess.

(28:03) All right, then. I hope you have a great weekend, and we’ll reconvene next week. And I’m pretty sure we’ll both be at the big surprise thing. We’ll pay close attention to that.

Okay. Talk to you later. Bye.

Evan Potter (28:13): We will. Bye-bye.