Do you understand the science behind polling? You don't have to ask every single resident to get an accurate result; you simply have to poll a valid sample set. The margin of error is included in the results.
Do you understand math and statistics, in particular the difference between a systematic sampling error, and the margin of error that is normally caused by the limited sample size?
Assume you have a town with 100,000 people, 32% of them like basketball and 44% like baseball. When you poll 500 people, you might find that 34% of those polled like basketball, and 41% like baseball. You will have a margin of error equal to 2 or 3 or 4 points. You could get a smaller error by polling more people, but for many purposes, your results are already good enough.
Now if you conduct your poll on a day of a major baseball game, you might get only 15% responses in favor of baseball. That's because many baseball fans will be out watching the game, or glued to the screens and not taking phone calls. That would be a systematic sampling error. The error wouldn't get any smaller if you polled more people on the same day, and it wouldn't be reflected in the margin of error.
Anyway, I said that the poll results have to be taken with a grain of salt; never said that they all should be ignored.
These polls were done years into the debate. They've far more reliable than cherry picking election results. People voting may not care about transit either, and you have no way of knowing which votes voted specifically about one issue.
Cherry picking is selecting one group of data that suites you most, and ignoring the rest. That's exactly what you are doing when you refer to the polls only and ignore results of multiple election campaigns.
Just because you call the polls far more reliable, they don't actually become far more reliable.
Except that the costs aren't fully outlined (council has stated there's room for at least 50% growth) and the majority of Torontoians are against the plan.
The majority of Torontoians are fine with the subway plan.
BTW you're completely contradicting yourself.
In your imagination.
Supposedly the last election was a decision on subways vs LRTs, yet Scarborough voted overwhelmingly in favour of Doug Ford, who basically ran the same platform as his brother in 2010, including the same misleading transit statements.
So was it a vote on the subway, or a vote for lower taxes and lower spending?
During the 2010 election campaign, I heard / read a lot of noises about taxes from the Ford's side, and much less about transit. Therefore I decided to make it a bit easier for you, and not insist on including the 2010 election results in the body of evidence that the electorate tends to support pro-subway candidates.
But if you want them included, no problem. They fit into the trend.
Is it fair to say Scarborough voted for homophobia and bigotry along with a subway?
No it's not fair to say what you said.
First of all, homophobia and bigotry were RoFo's personal failings, not elements of his election platform. Secondly, the residents who voted for him, could not possibly expect to benefit from the said features of the mayor. Unlike the subway, that they definitely hoped to benefit from (you are free to believe or not whether they will actually benefit).
It is fair to say that they chose to overlook RoFo's personal failings, in the hope that he will deliver them benefits of another nature. Whether that was a smart choice, is a matter of another debate that isn't relevant for a transit thread.