Election or Revolution?

In the end, did the earth move in last year’s federal election?

This is the question with which Christopher Dornan begins his introduction to this study. Was it just another election or was it a political revolution? The question is intriguing, of course, but not one for this book, which is about the past and not the future. True, several contributors play around with it, but they do not know the answer any more than the rest of us. It all depends on so many factors.

Before I continue I must declare an interest. In 1984 I was teaching in the journalism school at Carleton University and, with a colleague, Alan Frizzell, a statistician, was introducing students to a new form of political reporting—the art and science of polling. In the election that year we polled for the national Southam Group of newspapers and also ran an ambitious study of newspaper coverage. We wound up with a mountain of data on the campaign and nowhere to publish it. There were no...