A random sample of two three voters in the GTA riding of Whitby-Oshawa today showed a surge for Libertarian candidate Josh Insang. Although his numbers may not hold up over the rest of the day, he had 100% support of the voters we polled.
May 2, 2011
Exit poll in Whitby-Oshawa shows Libertarian surge
May 1, 2011
Final pre-election poll numbers
Tomorrow looks like an interesting day:
Click thumbnail to view full size table
Update: To further emphasize how interesting tomorrow’s vote may be, Colby Cosh points out that nobody is confident in their predictions:
Are you ready to stay up late May 2? Do you have good coffee and plenty of snacks laid in? This may be the election with the highest quantity of uncertainty in my adult experience. The NDP’s dazzling polling gains simply have no obvious recent precedent. I’m not sure a national party has ever made strides of this magnitude and nature in such a bewilderingly short time.
Think about the questions you have to ask to estimate the impact, in terms of Commons representation, of a shift like this; you have to form ideas about the sincerity of the polling subjects’ intentions, the efficiency of the resulting gains in various regions, and the pure logistical power of the party to get out its vote, all while taking into account the activity and the relative positions of three or four other parties.
And then, as if all that weren’t enough, some old flatfoot comes along and tells some TV guys about Jack Layton getting naked in a place he ought not to have been naking around in. Nobody knows what will happen on May 2 — and I don’t mean that in the usual perfunctory way. This time, really, nobody has any idea. Having messed around with election models, I could tell you plausible stories that involve the NDP winning 120 seats; I could tell you stories of roughly equal plausibility that put them at 55.
Of course, there are limits. I am just about ready to rule out a Diefenbaker-like cross-country rampage by the Conservatives. I am just about ready to promise that Michael Ignatieff will not look happy on Monday evening. (Though even then: how stupefyingly low are expectations for him at this point?) What I can tell you is what how I would bet, if I had to bet. I believe, halfway through the weekend, that the Conservative push for a majority will come down to the wire. And I think they are a little more likely to get there than not.
April 30, 2011
Latest poll numbers
What looks like a weakening of the NDP surge may just be an artifact of the Nanos three-day polling window. We won’t know until Monday:
Click image to embiggen (the table is getting too wide to show at full size)
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April 28, 2011
Latest Nanos poll confirms NDP gains
While not quite as dramatic as some of the headline polls over the last couple of days, the Nanos three-day tracking poll confirms that the NDP surge is real, knocking the Liberals decisively back into third place:
April 26, 2011
Americans really are jaded about their politicians
A survey from Rasmussen shows that many Americans think of their political representatives as little better than scum:
Mark Twain once said, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” A large number of Americans share that skepticism.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 43% of the nation’s voters believe that most members of Congress are corrupt. Only 27% disagree and doubt that most national legislators are that dishonorable. Thirty percent (30%) are not sure.
Interestingly, there’s little difference of opinion on this question between Republicans and Democrats. But voters not affiliated with either of the major parties are more doubtful: 51% think most members of Congress are corrupt.
That’s got to be an affront to the honest politicians . . . the other 91% are giving them a bad reputation:
Only nine percent (9%) of voters now say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Fifty-six percent (56%) rate its performance as poor.
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April 25, 2011
Majority in reach for Harper, if Ontario numbers hold up
The latest Nanos/Globe & Mail poll shows that the Conservatives might just be able to reach majority status if the Ontario numbers stay steady for the final week:
Nationally, the NDP is statistically tied for second place with the Liberals. But another story is emerging out of Ontario, where they are running third; the party’s surge in Quebec and other regions has not given it a similar bump in Ontario.
Pollster Nik Nanos sees this as a boon for the Tories — one that could well provide the Conservatives a route to that coveted majority.
“Talk about Jack Layton in Stornoway has actually helped the Conservatives in Ontario,” Mr. Nanos said Monday. “The Conservatives best chance to win a majority is in Ontario. If their numbers hold or start ramping up in Ontario that could be good news for the Conservatives. One of the scenarios that we could be looking at now is a squeaker of a majority government.”
Of course, the regional numbers are subject to a larger margin of error:
There is a margin of error of plus or minus 64 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, for the provincial sample.
I hope there’s a decimal place somewhere in that MoE.
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April 24, 2011
Latest poll shows Liberals in statistical tie with NDP
If you wanted an interesting election, this one is certainly shaping up as the most interesting in the last ten years:
April 21, 2011
News topic for today: the rise in NDP support in Quebec
It may be just another blip in the polling, or it could really be the NDP benefitting from weaker BQ numbers. Lots of trees will be consumed in this debate, and many electrons will be inconvenienced. The national numbers don’t show the pattern all that well, but the NDP may finally be close to that popularity breakthrough they’ve been hoping for since the brief taste of power they got in the Trudeau years. Instead of asking the Liberal leader how many NDP cabinet seats he’d need to give to Jack Layton, we might be asking Jack how many Liberal cabinet ministers he’d have in his coalition.
Jack Layton’s New Democratic Party has surged past Gilles Duceppe’s faltering Bloc Quebecois and is now in first place in Quebec, according to an Ekos public opinion poll released exclusively to iPolitics.
The poll, conducted earlier this week, found the New Democrats have jumped 10 percentage points since the eve of the leaders debate to 31.1% while the Bloc has dropped like a rock by 7.4 percentage points to 23.7%.
The Liberals are steady at 20.6% while the Conservatives have dropped slightly to 16.9%.
While the margin of error is higher at the city level, in Montreal the NDP is at 32.9% while the Bloc is at 29.7%.
Nationally, the NDP is now in a statistical tie with the Liberals at 24.9% to 25.8%. Both lag well behind the Conservatives who were preferred by 34.5% of respondents.
Update: Jane Taber has more on the regional breakdown:
Atlantic Canada now is shaping up to be a three-way race, with the NDP gaining every day for the past seven days. The Tories are at 36.3 per cent followed by the Liberals with 33.1 per cent and the NDP at 28.3 per cent. (There is a margin of error of plus or minus 9.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20 in the regional sample.)
In British Columbia, the Liberals have dropped significantly — Mr. Ignatieff has seen his support decrease from 33.5 per cent Monday to 22.7 per cent Wednesday night. The Conservatives have 43.5 per cent support and the NDP are at 29.6 per cent, up from 24.7 per cent the night before. (The margin of error in that province is plus or minus 7.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)
In Quebec, Mr. Layton remains strong although the Bloc is still in first place with 32 per cent support compared to 23.4 per cent for the NDP, 20.8 per cent for the Liberals and 17.5 per cent for the Conservatives. “At 32 per cent it would be the worst ever showing for the BQ in a federal election,” Mr. Nanos said, noting that their previous worst showing was in 1997 where they won 37.9 per cent of the vote.
If all of this isn’t just a blip, it’s terrible news for Michael Ignatieff. That grinding noise you hear is the knife-sharpening back at Liberal HQ.
Update, the second: If the initial news was promising for Jack Layton, the poll done for La Presse must have been like a big shot of adrenalin:
A new poll by CROP for La Presse suggests that the enthusiasm for Mr. Layton is such that the NDP has now overtaken the Bloc Québécois in voting intentions for the first time in Canadian history. The online poll suggested that the NDP is now first choice for 36% of Quebecers, compared to 31% for the Bloc, 17% for the Conservatives and a mere 13% for the once mighty Liberal Party.
Having heard the NDP boast about “historic breakthroughs” over the years, I’m loath to get too carried away until these numbers are confimed by other pollsters. In 2008, Mr. Layton was in a statistical tie with Stéphane Dion two weeks before election day but ended up trailing by eight points and 40 MPs.
Yet there are signs this time might be different. In Quebec in particular, the Liberal brand is damaged goods and the Bloc is looking like a tired, one-trick pony. There is nowhere else to go for left-of-centre voters.
Update, the third: Forum Research says that the NDP is already in second place nationally:
“The Tories are ahead everywhere except Quebec, it’s all going to come down to what happens in Quebec,” says Mr. Bozinoff, noting the tradition of Quebec voters to move en masse when they have sharply changed preferences in past elections.
The survey of 2,727 voting-age Canadians was conducted Wednesday evening. It was an interactive voice response survey with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 per cent 19 times out of 20. The margin of error for regional and provincial breakdowns is slightly higher, but in such a large survey, with 348 citizens reached in the GTA alone, it is a reliable indicator of election trend lines.
Nationally, the survey gave the Conservative Party support from 36 per cent of decided and leaning voters, 25 per cent for the NDP, 23 per cent for the Liberal party, and six per cent each for the Green Party and the Bloc Québécois. A separate Forum Research analysis, based partly on ridings won and lost in the 2008 election, suggest the survey results would give the Conservatives 149 of the 308 Commons seats if an election were held today, with 71 seats for the NDP, 64 for the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois would have 24 seats.
My occasionally updated percentage tracker, now (thanks to commenter request) with a graph to match:
April 17, 2011
April 15, 2011
Finnish election still up for grabs
Remember I mentioned the “True Finns” party in passing last week? The election is this weekend and it looks like a four-way race:
Finland votes on Sunday in its most closely watched general election in years, with the campaign hijacked by a Eurosceptic maverick riding roughshod over the consensus that has long characterised the country’s politics.
Timo Soini has alarmed the European and Finnish elites by leading his True Finns party into a neck-and-neck position with the three mainstream parties that traditionally dominate Finnish politics.
The quadrupling of support for the True Finns since the last election in 2007 puts Finland firmly in line with the cardinal trend in politics across Europe in the past year — the emergence of the populist far right combining nostalgia for disappearing values and traditions with anti-immigrant and anti-EU appeal.
An opinion poll on Friday put the True Finns at around 16% in a coalition system, soaring from 4% in 2007 albeit sliding a little from their position in surveys last week. That put True Finns neck and neck with the Centre party of the prime minister, Mari Kiviniemi, and the opposition social democrats, and a few points behind the poll leaders, the National Coalition party led by the finance minister, Jyrki Katainen.
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April 13, 2011
Surprisingly little movement in the polls
So far, based on the three-day sample Nanos works with for their daily poll release, there hasn’t been a lot of identifiable shifting support among the parties in spite of the leaked AG report:
Update: Of course, not all polls agree, but the Compas poll for the Toronto Sun has radically different numbers based on the regional breakdown:
H/T to David Akin for the image (via Twitpic).
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Leaders’ debate provides no significant changes
I didn’t bother watching the first debate on TV last night, as I didn’t think there would be any purpose in doing so. Lots of people seem to have felt the same way, as polling immediately after the debate showed little change in support:
It was Stephen Harper’s debate to lose — and he did not.
It was Michael Ignatieff’s debate to win — and he did not.
A poll done exclusively for QMI Agency immediately after Tuesday night’s English-language debate shows that English-speaking Canada was, by and large, unmoved by the two-hour duel among the four party leaders.
Asked who won the debate, 37% of those surveyed by Leger Marketing said Harper was the victor. About 21% said Ignatieff won.
Those numbers roughly mirror voter support in polls Leger has done before and during the election campaign.
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April 9, 2011
Latest poll: Liberals up, NDP down
The Liberals appear to the party primarily benefitting from a slackening in NDP support:
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April 6, 2011
April 4, 2011
Politics: Tories have terrible week, yet are up to 14 point lead
The most useful polling right now is coming from Nanos Research, who are conducting daily summaries of the previous three-day trend. After getting slapped around by the press much of last week, the Conservatives are . . . the only party making gains over the last three days:
- Conservative: 42%, up 1.6%
- Liberal: 28%, down 1%
- NDP: 16%, down 0.5%
- Bloc Quebecois: 8%, unchanged
- Green: 4%, down 0.2%
The Twitter reactions are . . . surprised. Paul Wells “If the Conservatives lost week one and gained four points, the Liberals can’t afford to win many more weeks.” Andrew Coyne “Another such victory and I come back to Epirus alone.”
Updating the non-scientific, unbalanced sample of published polls:
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