Posts by George Darroch
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I watched that Beats by Apple ad yesterday, and thought it was just some random Brasilian dude (which is cool, amo os brasilieros). Only after watching the Nike ad did I realise that was Neymar, who is apparently good at sportsball.
Brasil already had a very handy lead according to 538's very interesting data informed coverage of the tournament.
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
The current interpretation of “Every living room shall be fitted with a fireplace and chimney or other approved form of heating” is that there has to be a power point in the living room so you can plug your heater in. Which seems completely contrary to what I was taught about statutory interpretation, but there it is.
That seems quite perverse.
As for the rental WOF, the amount of noise from the sector has made me sure that acting unilaterally is the way to go. There are simply too many landlords who have interest in the welfare of their tenants or the standard of their dwellings to reach a reasonable compromise with the sector.
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Hard News: Meanwhile back at the polls, in reply to Euan Mason,
If another couple of polls agree with this then Key may be tempted to use the Banks debacle as an excuse for an early election.
That's extremely unlikely. All of the mechanisms for an election have been set in place (by the Electoral Commission, parties, media, others) and we're just outside the regulated period of three months before the election. Such an action would make National look less like a worthy government, and would incur significant backlash.
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Hard News: Meanwhile back at the polls, in reply to Andrew Robertson,
You know, since the dawn of population survey research the samples have been flawed. This hasn’t just come about in recent times because of increasing land line non-coverage. Land line non-coverage is just one of many potential sources of error, and in my view it’s not the most important one.
This is a discussion that's been had here before, and I'm aware of a range of biases. I've sat behind the phones in downtown Wellington for several months. So I'm aware of sampling, and some of the methods used. I'm also familiar with some of the techniques used to statistically correct for a sample population.
The biggest problem we all have is: how do we know that the 18 year old male we are talking to on the phone is like other 18 year old males in New Zealand. We don't. And that's okay, there will always be a degree of uncertainty. I'm comfortable with that. My measure is in voters, not opinion polls. In voters I trust, all others must bring data.
The problem is that polls are the primary way that political performance is measured and this degree of difference (consistently around 5% points at the last election) is large enough to influence outcomes.
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Hard News: Meanwhile back at the polls, in reply to Peter Green,
When they all move together, that’s what we expect — it’s not evidence that the swings are real.
I just looked at the last 4 movements in GCR, and compared them to voting intention in favour of parties in the current Government.
+8.5 (GCR), +8 (Gvt.)
+3.5 (GCR), +2.5 (Gvt.)
-7.5 (GCR), -5.5 (Gvt.)
+10 (GCR), +4.5 (Gvt.)You’d expect a low degree of independence. Obviously, it’s very difficult to pry apart the direction here, even if the swings are real. As always, it's the trend that counts.
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Hard News: Meanwhile back at the polls, in reply to Henry Barnard,
Polls bounce. The last poll may have been up a lot – 13.5% is well into the upper range of current Green polling – and thus the actual drop may be less. In the order of 20 or so voters saying that they would vote for someone else on the telephone. Real, but not sufficiently concerning until it is replicated in one or two more polls.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that there is serious landline bias, but I don’t believe it’s the saviour of anyone. It isn’t large enough to magically form a new government, and its effect on pundits is to encourage them to keep on with their current set of stories about politics. Mike Smith has started outlining his thoughts on this problem at the Standard (don’t read the comments), and I’ll be interested to see what he has to say.
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Hard News: Meanwhile back at the polls, in reply to Bart Janssen,
As a point of anecdata, I had a conversation with an in-law who used to vote Labour but wouldn’t this time because he thought The Greens would then get to control the country.
Quite so. There are likely to be many, and private polling by Labour (they wouldn't have money to do a lot of it, but I'm sure it's been done) will let them know roughly how many there are.
However, I suspect it's no better or worse than in late 1999. The problem is that this is not a 'change' election, it's a 'better' election. Change compels an entirely different set of responses.
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I don’t think the spluttering was really that coherent, but it probably is true that a large-ish group of non-tribal voters sees a multi-party centre-left coalition possibly relying on New Zealand First and Kim Dotcom as less secure than what they currently have with National.
This is something I have been saying for quite some time, based on my own prejudices, conversations, and understanding of the polls. For every person who likes NZF, there are 5 who dislike it. That in itself is not a problem for NZF, because those who dislike them don’t vote for them, and are thus inconsequential. But the problem Labour has is that among those who dislike NZF, there are plenty who are confirmed or potential Labour voters. The ratio is almost certainly worse for IMP, currently polling around 1%. The path to 61 isn’t a pretty one.
Labour’s other problem is that the Greens also come with a bunch of both negatives and positives, and that these negatives are a risk, but that the perception of being unable to form a government or a government worth voting for is a huge risk. They have chosen not to take one possible way of reducing that risk, in the form of an entente cordiale with the Greens. They have also chosen not to associate with the positives that the Greens bring to Labour, something backed by hard polling data: 93% of those voting Labour at the last election chose the Greens as their prefered partner. On current performance the figure is likely to be similar, if not even better.
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Not All Elliot Rodgers.
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Nice chewy viz, and it tells us something interesting. But you're missing the GiST of the story.