41st Canadian federal election - post mortem

As results trickled in last night, boy was everyone shocked. First of all, while squeaking out a majority was considered a possibility, nobody expected 167 seats. Toronto, thank you. Next, while the NDP surge was quite properly predicted, it was still a meteoric rise and a historic moment. Third, the Liberal decimation was even worse than what most expected - even Ignatieff lost his seat. Fourth, nobody thought the Bloc would be so inefficient in its vote distribution - 23% of the vote and only 4 seats, Duceppe not included. Fifth and finally, Elizabeth May finally won her seat. There was actually a riding poll showing her in the lead, but it was commissioned by the Greens and I was skeptical.

The polls...to put it bluntly, failed miserably. Especially on the Conservative share. They were good for Quebec, but wildly off (underestimating the Tories) in every other region. While I corrected for some of that by giving the Tories an extra percent of the vote, while penalizing the NDP by two, it was still not enough. At 152 seats in the projection, I was actually among the least bad. I had a total error of 38 seats, compared with the 40's and even 50's for many. This sort of sea-change election validates my experiment with projecting ranges. Even with ranges, however, the Bloc fell outside of the range in terms of seats and the Conservatives broke the ceiling of their vote share range.

This calls for the question - was it the projection model's fault? Plugging in the ACTUAL results into the model, I get precisely 167 Conservatives. However, I would have underestimated the Liberals, giving them 26 seats. The NDP would have received 104 seats, and the Bloc 11. I would have been right about no independent, but still wrong about Elizabeth May. That's a total error of 18 - much improved over the polling numbers, meaning that it was mostly the pollsters' fault.

All in all, this was a failed call because I missed the most important detail - majority or minority. Oh well...at least I got the order of the parties right.