Mea Culpa or, So Much for the Great Prognosticator

[ed_rex]

Back on the 10th, I decided to damn the polls and so, over on canpolitik, I stuck to my guns and predicted tonight's results as follows.

Liberals: 155
Conservatives: 77
Bloc: 39
NDP: 36
Green: 1

What can I say? The actual results as of 11:44 are in fact,

Conservatives: 144 (not a majority, thank god!)
Liberals: 74 (I don't understand Dion — why couldn't he campaign? What the hell happened to the Liberals' organization?)
Bloc: 50 (Good to see their share of the popular vote decrease)
NDP: 38
Independent: 2

Not quite a disaster for this country, but not a particularly heartening result either. On the other hand, those Yanks among you who are as frightened of McCain/Palin as I am might take heart from the fact I predicted a McCain landslide — here's hoping I'll be as wrong about the results in the US as I was about those north of the border. (I note also that my father is slightly smarter than I am; he predicted a Liberal minority. Tomorrow we shall commiserate via telephonic device.)

Comments

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Nice to see the NDP gradually picking up seats, although as in the UK there's the "Vote Liberal (or Labour as it is in the UK) to stop a Tory" ethos preventing them and other parties from picking up seats.

In the UK getting rid of First-Past-The-Post would make a massive difference to the Liberal Democrats. With 600-odd seats smaller parties face an uphill struggle to get anywhere. The last Conservative government was a minority by the end as a result of defections, etc, (and relied on the Irish Unionist parties to pass bills) but an election hasn't returned a hung parliament since 1974, and there was another election that year to resolve the issue.