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Divisions in Hamilton

It has been almost eighteen years since the City of Hamilton was amalgamated with the former municipalities of Ancaster, Stony Creek, Flamborough, Glanbrook and Dundas, yet, the community remains divided on a number of very important issues. The most recent Mayoral race provided a stark example: the campaign focused (almost exclusively) on the Council-approved plan to build a Light Rail Transit (LRT) line in the downtown core.

This election is only the tip of the iceberg in showing the divide in Hamilton. A detailed survey conducted by ThreeHundredThirtyEight.com on behalf of the Beasley Neighbourhood Association shows the extent of the community divide.




The Beasley Neighbourhood Association survey was conducted using interactive voice response technology on September 10th and 11th, 2018 from 6:45 pm to approximately 8:45 pm each evening. Results were weighted to roughly match the age and gender of the population of the City of Hamilton according to the 2016 Census. A total of 561 people completed the first question of the survey and 379 completed the entire survey. A total of 401,333 phone numbers were called as part of this campaign. A total of 109,867 of these numbers were active lines (i.e. the call was an active number that either generated no answer, an answering machine or the call was answered). A contact rate of 19.3% was achieved (i.e. 21,188 of the active lines answered the phone). The response rate was 0.35% (the rate improves to 0.51% when examining only the first question). (Raw survey data can be found here).

The results of the survey were skewed towards voters, with 80.0% of respondent indicating they had voted in the last municipal election compared to actual turnout of 33.5%. This skew towards voters is not entirely surprising, as individuals who are likely to vote are also the same individuals who are more likely to take part in a survey asking about civic issues.

Overall the rating of the performance of Hamilton City Council as a whole over the past four years is not positive. 34% of people rated the performance as poor or very poor and another 45% rated it as average, while on 20% rated the city council’s performance as good or very good. This rating was significantly divided between those over and under 65. A total of 29% of Hamilton residents over 65% rated council’s performance as good or very good while only 15% of those under 65 gave a good or very good rating.  Local councillors themselves did considerably better, with 40% giving their local councillor a very good or good rating, 36% an average rating and 24% a poor or very poor rating.

We also asked residents to indicate which of six issues were important to them on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 and 2 being Very important and somewhat important. These issues were ranked as follows by Hamilton residents:

    1. Public Safety & Crime (85% rating as important with a 1 or 2)
    2. The condition of local roads and highways (83%)
    3. Tax Increase (70%)
    4. Keeping the price of housing affordable (68%)
    5. Improving parks, green spaces & recreational programs (67%)
    6. Funding public transit (56%)

These topline results, however, do not reveal the significant divide between respondents in the lower city and Hamilton Mountain and those in rural and suburban Hamilton. When comparing these issues between the downtown and mountain areas and the rural and suburban areas three issues had a statistically significant difference in levels of support.

Percent Indicating Issue is a Priority
Issues Downtown/Mountain Rural/suburban
Taxes Low 66 77
Keeping housing affordable 73 57
Public Transit Funding 60 48

No statistical difference was found between the condition of local roads, improving parks, or public safety and crime.

Percent Indicating Issue is a Priority
Issues Downtown/Mountain Rural/suburban
Condition of Local Roads 83 84
Improving Parks 69 64
Public Safety and Crime 86 83

Despite the lower ranking amongst issues, specific questions about housing affordability revealed significant support for taking action to improve affordability. A total of 70% of Hamilton residents indicated they support taking action to keep Hamilton affordable for renters and homeowners. In addition, 64% of residents support requiring developers to include affordable housing units in new buildings

The Accuracy of the Dyad Ratio Algorithm and the 2015 Federal Election

The Dyad Ratio Algorithm, as explained in the previous post, can be used to estimate public opinion towards issues or support for political parties. This approach does not weight the polling firms on their accuracy or their potential bias instead all surveys are assumed to be equally valid, with the only variance in importance of a poll for the model based on the survey sample size. This is contrast to Éric Grenier’s approach at CBC and Nate Silver’s approach at fivethirtyeight.com.

Grenier at CBC weights the results by sample size, time of the poll, and firm accuracy. Polling firm accuracy is determined by the firm’s last survey before an election compared to the election result for each election polled over the past ten years. A survey’s impact diminishes by 35% for each day of an election. Silver at fivethirtyeight.com also uses accuracy of the polling firm and a measure for house effects which is built into the model itself. Silve’s approach also uses sample size to weight the impact.




ThreeHundredThirtyEight.com at this time does not have a record of the accuracy of polling firms, as such the approach used here accounts for each poll equally in the results. When examining the 2015 federal election the  model’s approach performed quite well at predicting party support.

Comparing the projections from the Dyad Ratio Algorithm using Wcalc to the election results each outcome is within 1.1 percentages points of the final results. (Note the election results were re-calculated to remove those who voted for an ‘other’ party). The Conservatives are projected exactly, Bloc within 0.2 percentage points, the NDP are within 0.5 percentage points, the Liberals within 0.8 percentage points and the Greens within 1.1 percentage points.

The results of the Dyad Ratio Algorithm also outperformed the projection from Éric Grenier narrowly. Grenier has the Conservatives within 1 percentage point, Bloc within 0.2 percentage points, the NDP are within 2 percentage points, the Liberals within 2.3 percentage points and the Greens within 1 percentage point. Though it is worth noting that Grenier’s projections were able to include ‘other’, which he projected to yield 0.9% support compared to the 0.8% they actually received. Also, in fairness, the Dyad Ratio Algorithm projections are being made after the fact and Grenier’s were made in real time before the election results were known. To put it another way, if these results had shown ThreeHundredThirtyEight.com to do significantly worse this model would have been re-examined.

The next step is to begin testing the model to predict support during elections. Future posts will use data from Wikipedia to show how the Dyad Ratio Algorithm is projecting support for the federal parties on an on-going basis.

Party Support in the 2015 Federal Election

As promised in my first post, this post uses the 2015 federal election to show how ThreeHundredThirtyEight.com will track support for political parties over time use the Dyad Ratio Algorithm as calculated using Wcalc by James Stimson.

Essentially this algorithm uses the differences between polls and their sample sizes to show the varying level of support for issues or parties over time. When the timing of polls overlap this gives the ratio an opportunity to evaluate how they compare to one another. The multiple polls that are inputted into the program then are combined to create a trend line show changes in support over time. One important note with this approach, for a result to appear in the calculation the polling firm needs to ask the question at least twice (and the more times the better).




Before demonstrating the approach a few other caveats should be covered. Wcalc offers a smoothing option, which is used in this analysis. The smoothing effect assumes that changes in opinion are generally gradual and that abrupt changes may be the result of sampling error. Smoothing has a particularly large impact at times when there are only a few polls and typically less of an impact when there are many polls in a given time period.

Secondly, since the Dyad Ratio Algorithm is used to estimate support for each political party individually the total support levels at any one point in time does not always add up to exactly 100%. When this occurs the data has been reweighted so the total support for each political party always equals 100%.

When the Dyad Ratio Algorithm estimates each party’s level of support during the 2015 federal election the results can be graphed to show the changes over time. The resulting graph shows the levels of support for the NDP fall dramatically starting in late September and the Liberal party rising mostly steady throughout the campaign.

The previous graph was created using data from the Wikipedia page Opinion polling in the Canadian federal election, 2015. This Wikipedia page also graphs the data thanks to the work of Galneweinhaw. The Wikipedia graph is created by using Local Regressions; they also add confidence intervals in grey at the 95% level.

Opinion Polling during the 2015 Canadian Federal Election

The noticeable difference between the approaches is the additional smoothing in the Wikipedia approach. Here the NDP trendline is much clearer in its direction from the start of the campaign to the end. While this is a valuable approach for avoiding the impact of outlier polls, the additional smoothing may be less likely to pick up a shift in support, instead assuming a high or low poll is simply an outlier.

Indeed, both approaches have value when interpreting an election. ThreeHundredThirtyEight.com will use the Dyad Ratio Algorithm to provide observers with more information about the election. In addition, the Dyad Ratio Algorithm is much more valuable when estimating changes in public opinion over time, as these changes are based on significantly less polling data.

In the next post how the Dyad Ratio Algorithm performed at predicting the final vote totals for each political party in the 2015 election will be explored. If you would like to work with this dataset yourself the raw data is available at http://doi.org/10.3886/E107121V1