A political pollster is admitting its mistake after it bet on the wrong horse in the Calgary city election two months ago.

In the days leading up to the election in October, Mainstreet Research released a number of surveys that ended up putting challenger Bill Smith in the mayor’s chair instead of Naheed Nenshi.

Nenshi ended up winning, taking 51 percent of the popular vote.

Now, the firm says it’s tracked down why it was so wrong in the polls, saying that five factors ended up contributing to a 25 percent deviation between the pre-election poll and the final outcome.

Those included a failure to poll in non-official languages and a tendency among Nenshi voters not to respond to Mainstreet polls.

The company says it was also wrong about the ratio of young people to seniors in Calgary and assumptions about how many would end up voting in the election.

Nenshi said it’s clear that Mainstreet made a number of mistakes in its studies.

“The headline is ‘we didn’t do it maliciously, we just made big mistakes’. There seem to be some assertions that people who vote for Nenshi don’t answer polls. Well, doesn’t that mean the poll is wrong?”

Mainstreet says it’s hoping to develop some new technology in the near future that will help improve the accuracy of its polling, but says that it will require significant investment to do that.

Nenshi has accepted Mainstreet’s apology.