FF/FG/Green Government - Part 3

Someone woke him up? :) He's probably quite lucky in that most of the fallout on this seems to be focused on FF and FG.

Regards...jmcc

You'd wonder if they were playing with a full deck at times. Have Covid unemployment payments been blamed for the DAA's failure to recruit people yet?

Regards...jmcc

So you started to complain about me shutting people down while proceeding to shut down my own comments. Back seat modding ain't allowed by the way.

Some businesses will take advantage of any opportunity like that to cut costs. The problem is that when demand returns, they simply don't have the people to cope with that demand.

Regards...jmcc

No, didn't do any of those things you mentioned. I think you are talking about someone else, a ghost or you are confused.

You don't know much about polls. As for your ridiculous claim that simply because RedC is using a panel of approximately 40K it is open to manipulation, that's rubbish. RedC's 40K panel effectively produces results that are closer to a tracking poll that measures sentiment across the same set of respondents over a period rather than a polls with a random sample of the electorate which provide a potentially more representative view of public sentiment. The difference in methodologies between pollsters explains some of the differences in party support in different polls but when polls start showing the same general trends, the confidence in the larger party support is somewhat higher. That obviously upsets you because SF is the most popular party according to all polls and both FF and FG are struggling and the Green Party has effectively collapsed to its traditional core support percentages.

Regards...jmcc

This is what RedC says about its polling:

I don't think that you or Brokenangel have any knowledge of polling or methodologies given that you have not demonstrated any such knowledge here or on other threads. The two of you seem extremely upset that SF is leading across all polls including RedC. People and businesses have confidence in RedC as a polling company where as you two are just anonymous posters on a forum.

Regards...jmcc

I wouldn't mind, not only have you helpfully explained how Red C do their polling before, the info is in the public domain 😏

What's interesting about RedC's polling is that it is more likely to pick up some shifts in sentiment before the other pollsters simply because it uses a panel of voters rather than effectively starting from zero with a new random sample for each poll. There is a very slight continuity effect with RedC polls (some people being polled more than once over a period of time) as a result of this. That slight continuity effect allowed the spread on the seats between the largest of the Big Three parties and the smallest to be called before the 2016 GE. That really irritated some FG posters who simply would not believe that FG was heading for something close to a 2002 style seat loss.

One of the most important polls in the 2016 US presidential election was a tracking poll of the same set of voters over a period of a year and it picked up the shift to Trump when others completely missed it. They are quite different to random sample polls. The real test of whether a pollster is accurately measuring support is in votes. All of the pollsters tracked the destruction of Labour. The rise of SF in the two months before the 2020 GE caught a lot of the media by surprise but the pollsters were tracking it but the commentators/polcorrs in the media, some of whom had become effectively institutionalised with their support for their favourite parties almost refused to believe it. They had made up their minds and the seat estimates for FF/FG/Labour from some of these commentators was, to say the least, wildly optimistic. What really caused problems for FF, FG and SF was that they had decided on their candidate strategy months before the election. FF and FG were stuck with running too many candidates and SF ran too few. SF won't make that mistake again and neither will FF or FG (if they haven't merged into a single party) in the next GE.

Regards...jmcc

Kate O'Connell had voted against Varadkar in the leadership election. She probably would have won that seat but internal FG politics (Varadkar and his gang) seemed to put an end to that. What was interesting was that one of the pollsters (B&A, I think) got FF's level of support right (around 5% for the FF candidate). It should have been an easy win for FG with a good candidate. FF wasn't even competing for the seat.

Some of the vote that would have gone to O'Connell ended up with Bacik. Given the events of the last fifteen years, FG had a lot of opportunities to finish off FF but they never took them. It will be very difficult for Bacik to hold that seat in DBS because she was, despite the promotion by RTE (TV programme before the election), very much an accidental winner due to the incompetence of FG and the reluctance of FF to run a strong candidate. O'Callaghan may hold his seat on FG transfers but it is still far from certain. He would have been a far more competent Justice minister than McEntee and he was right to refuse a junior ministership.

Regards...jmcc

If we are going to talk about trolling, what about Barbara Pym and similar accounts?