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Election gaffe of the week Local pollsters, pundits all wrong! What happened? Since the days leading up to the debate, polls have repeatedly indicated that the Parti Québécois was pulling ahead of the Liberals. In the last week of the campaign, polls showed the PQ with a lead of 8 to 10 points. Pundits were confidently predicting that the PQ would take anywhere from 85 to 95 seats, up from 77 at the time the election was called. In the end, the numbers of Liberal and PQ seats stayed more or less the same, with both parties shuffling a few deck chairs here and there. And the Liberals received a slightly larger percentage of the popular vote (43.71%) than the PQ (42.70%). Paradoxically, the only polling firm to correctly predict the popular-vote figures is an American one: Zogby International, commissioned by Reuters news agency. Zogby insisted that the popular-vote numbers were "too close to call" and that the Liberals always maintained a slight lead. Zogby, incidentally, was also the only polling firm to correctly predict the Democrats' surprise gains in the most recent U.S. elections. --Philip Preville
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