The people always get it right

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2010 (5076 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From pollsters to parties and pundits, just about everybody got this mayoral election wrong. Not so the people. The people got it exactly right.

The pollsters, for the most part, would have had the people believe that the race between Sam Katz and Judy Wasylycia-Leis was close, a nail-biter that would be decided at the last minute by well-oiled campaign machines. That scenario held up for about 20 minutes after polls closed Wednesday. After that it was no contest — Sam won by 13 percentage points.

Much of the media and the punditry, of course, were informed by the same polls that misjudged the result by a country mile. Trolling through the surveys’ findings on such arcane things as the commitment of voters to candidates, past voting behaviour, gender, openness to tax increases and so on resulted in narratives that also misread the mood of the electorate.

In addition to polling information, pundits had at their disposal the expert opinions of leaders of special interest groups who claim to speak for vast numbers of voters. Well, those same experts can be expected to continue to make such claims to be representative, but the result of the election speaks otherwise.

Party politics also played a part in shaping the misguided narrative, but if the NDP endorsements of candidates meant anything in this election, it was that such endorsements can be the kiss of death and a worrying sign for the provincial government, which must face the same voters a year from now.

But with so many sources so certain that they had divined the will of the people, the people willed otherwise.

The people willed that Mr. Katz would have a strong mandate to pursue policies on infrastructure and growth taxes — his “fair deal” — that are contrary to the policies that the pollsters, pundits and political partisans insisted were the defining issues of the election.

After all the millions of words spoken and written over a long campaign, the voters always have the last word. And in this Winnipeg mayoral election it was emphatically the voice of the people.