With much of today's political discussion focusing on Abacus' political party wordles, let's note a couple of major issues with the word clouds presented so far. While the clouds presented offer some useful information for each party discussed, the current story doesn't indicate which words are actually associated with each other within a single response (other than in some of the associated commentary) - leaving a glaring hole in any attempt to interpret how the leaders or parties are perceived.
In theory, that leaves the Libs with a chance to trumpet the fact that "leader" and "leadership" are technically their two leading responses - with no direct indication as to what other terms (positive or negative) actually get linked to those concepts. And there's equally no indication that negative terms such as "not" are taken into account rather than being cut out of the data set as "commonly used words".
So while the wordles may offer some hint as to the terms most commonly identified with Canada's political parties and the relative prominence of party leaders, they leave out important information about how the parties can work with those commonly-named concepts. And that should serve as reason for caution in drawing any particularly strong conclusions.
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