More Election Notes

1) People who affirm disregard for the polls and claim that a long-shot candidate can win don't understand how polls fail.

In general, where polls in the aggregate (avoiding the effect of single bad samples) have been surprised recently has tended to be where a switch of a few percent had an amplified effect on riding counts. (This is essentially what happened with the last Ontario election.) However, the Toronto mayoral election is a straight-up fight on the percentage of the vote. The probability of the polls being nearly 20% wrong is vanishingly small. (308.com shows an aggregated estimate of 23.4% for Chow and 41.2% for Tory.)

That doesn't mean that Chow can't conceivably pull off an upset win; but if she does, it will be reflected in polls close to the 27th.

2) Speaking of Chow winning, am I the only one who thinks that her strategy of all-out attacking Tory is fundamentally misconceived? There's a heavy anybody-but-Ford dynamic out there and as long as Ford is in second place any significant numbers being pulled off Tory will be replaced by voters worried about a Ford win.

If she were to focus on chipping off populist votes from Ford, though, and succeed in moving past him into second place, the ABF dynamic might be seriously weakened, allowing more progressive voters to shift back to her from Tory.

3) At the other extreme, there are the people who proclaim that they are voting for Chow despite her third-place standing in the polls because she's "the progressive candidate". No; she's aprogressive candidate. There are other candidates with markedly more progressive platforms. A vote for Chow (given her current standing) should be based on some combination of an assessment that her platform is the best and that she has the personal qualities to be the most effective mayor, but not on some general attachment to being "progressive".

4) A number of years ago, an organization with which I had connections had a proposal to give away some land it owned so that affordable housing could be built there. This was abandoned when it became apparent that even without the cost of the land factored in the cost of construction and maintenance would raise the price of the proposed units above the "affordable" level.

In general, under the current economic regime, affordable housing means housing which has been significantly subsidised. I remain to be convinced that any plan which does not allocate a lot of money will make any real impact on affordable housing. This means, in effect, that none of the plans of all three leading candidates can be taken seriously.