Polling companies have come under fire after failing to project a B.C. Liberal majority government prior to Tuesday's election, but Oraclepoll Research president Paul Seccaspina said a fluid electorate and differing methodologies have made precise findings challenging.
"I think some media present these polls as something given to them from above, that they're this gift you can take to the bank and guarantee them," Seccaspina said. "That's not the case anymore, especially with elections."
No public polling firm put the Liberals ahead of the NDP in the popular vote prior to the election, yet on Tuesday night the Liberals picked up 44 per cent of the ballots cast to 39 per cent for the NDP. The Liberals also won 50 of the 85 seats for a convincing majority in the legislature.
Oraclepoll did its final survey more than a week before the vote for the Victoria Times-Colonist, The Citizen's sister paper, and it showed a four-point NDP lead, but Seccaspina said his company's data showed the NDP bottoming out and the Liberals on the rise.
"We saw the trends coming on," he said. "When I listen to people say, 'pollsters are wrong,' what we do is only a snapshot in time."
Seccaspina said since fewer voters have brand loyalty to a particular party, many make up their minds in the days and weeks leading up to the vote. That makes it difficult for pollsters to capture a complete picture until very close to election day.
In the B.C. election, Seccaspina credited the late shift to a strong campaign by the Liberals and a weak campaign by the opposition NDP.
"I don't think [NDP leader Adrian Dix] fared very well at all, I think the NDP floundered in a lot of areas," he said. "[Liberal leader Christy] Clark is smooth and I think she did a lot to diffuse voter anger."
Many of the polls in the week leading up to the vote had shown that the Liberals were gaining momentum, but the movements had appeared to become stalled when some late-election polls were released.
Unlike many of its competitors, Oraclepoll uses live callers for its election polls - including one commissioned early in the campaign by the Citizen and CKPG News. Seccaspina said the online panels used by some other pollsters as well as the interactive voice response (IVR) or robocall polls aren't as useful when judging voter intent.
"These online panels you have to really look at with suspicion, because it's the same people you go to all the time," he said. "IVR polling, the voice-blasting, certain companies live by it - it's very cost effective, it costs you nothing. For us it costs people to get people on the phone, get a live body, we're talking to someone and it's traditional research."
Oraclepoll does use online panels and IVR polls if clients request them for market research studies, but even then Seccaspina cautions against them.
"One of the things that we as a firm have always stood by is telephone research and telephone polling," he said.
