Saturday, October 30, 2004

THE COOL KID'S TABLE

Stephen Taylor and the Campaign for Tommy

Stephen Taylor has some snide comments (his words, not mine) for an e-mail sent out on an NDP list serve encouraging members to vote for Tommy Douglas in The Greatest Canadian contest. I think he uses the opportunity mostly to take some pithy shots at the NDP (he's a Conservative) but his tone seems to suggest that there is something slightly dishonourable about using campaign tactics in relation to the contest.

I think if Stephen were questioned about it he would agree with me that this contest is nothing more than a glorified online poll. The whole idea is to use whatever tactics possible to stuff the ballot box for your issues or candidate. As much as I've been paying attention to this little CBC exercise in national myth making I think we can recognize that this is a highschool popularity contest writ large. I doubt that Tommy is the only candidate who has informal but organized campaigns behind him.

Current Analysis

My last analysis of the standings was somewhat off the mark but only because I was, through my own mistake, working with incorrect information. I had written that Gretzky and Cherry were stuck at 8th and 7th despite their episodes having aired, thereby implying that they had not recieved a significant 'episode bump.'

In fact, Gretzky's had only aired that night, and Cherry's had not yet been on. So I think that the recent upswing in votes for those two is now a result of people watching their episode. The main point is that Fox and Trudeau are still at 3rd and 4th respecitvely without their episodes having been on. The question is, will those people voting for Douglas, Cherry and Gretzky continue to vote for them, maintaing their positions, or are these one-time votes resulting from the 'episode bump'? Douglas's voters seem to be pretty committed, we'll have to wait until next week to see if Cherry can maintain his position, and how much of a surge Macdonald gets from his recent episode.

I still expect the final standings to be 1. Fox, 2. Trudeau, 3. Douglas. Although Tommy is proving to be very resilent there at the top. According to the CBC he is leading the vote from every province and territory except that of Nunavut.

Let the popularity contest continue.

Posted by Matthew @ 4:52 p.m.