Monday, May 03, 2010

April Poll Soup - Guergis Fallout?


According to Frank Graves, the Jaffergis Imbruglio has caused Stephen Harper to "have cold beads of sweat popping out of his brow". Well, the April poll numbers are in and, despite a slight dip Tory support, Harper's lead over the Liberals actually went up. If the guy's breaking into a cold sweat over that, he seriously needs to manage his stress level better.

For the Liberals, it seems unlikely they'll be able to ride a "we won't put Helena Guergis in Cabinet" platform to victory - they're down nearly 5 points since February and have returned to last fall's low-water mark of the Ignatieff era. The good news for them is that now, unlike then, Harper isn't setting the electorate on fire (time for another piano concert perhaps?). It appears a lot of potential Liberal voters are parked with the NDP, Bloc, and Greens for the moment.


Angus Reid (April 29-30, n = 1014 online)
CPC 35%
Lib 28%
NDP 19%
BQ 11%
Green 7%


Leger (April 27-29, n = 1505 online)
CPC 36%
Lib 25%
NDP 20%
BQ 9%
Green 8%


EKOS (April 21-27, n = 2303 robo dialled)
CPC 31.9%
Lib 26.6%
NDP 17.6%
BQ 9.7%
Green 10.9%
Other 3.3%


Ipsos Reid (April 20-22, n = 1000 phone)
CPC 35%
Lib 29%
NDP 16%
BQ 9%
Green 10%


Harris Decima (April 15-25, n=2,014 phone)
CPC 29%
Lib 27%
NDP 20%
BQ 11%
Green 12%


AVERAGE (change since March in brackets)

Conservative Party: 33.3% (-0.7%)
Liberal Party: 27.1% (-2.1%)
NDP: 18.5% (+0.5%)
Bloc Quebecois: 9.9% (+1.2%)
Green Party 9.6% (+0.9%)


For seat projections, check out riding by riding (CPC 130, Lib 85, BQ 53, NDP 40) or three hundred eight (CPC 126, Lib 99, BQ 51, NDP 32).

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posted by calgarygrit at 6:24 p.m.

7 Comments:

  • The RidingxRiding and 308 links aren't set right, Grit.

    Another good point to make is that there are CPC voters parked with the NDP/Bloc/Greens as well. Clearly the two main parties are falling out of favour, but I doubt those switched voters are willing to stick with the other parties as well. We need to bump them back to us somehow, and maybe grab a few of those disaffected Conservatives as well.

    Know what would give us some momentum? Have Michael Chong cross the floor.

    By Blogger Kyle H., at 6:45 p.m.  

  • fixed - thanks.

    I'd be surprised to see Chong cross if he's stayed with the CPC for this long. But you never know.

    By Blogger calgarygrit, at 8:55 p.m.  

  • It's interesting to see the NDP shooting up in these pools. I haven't seen them do much to grab attention of late (unless it's on HST) so I suspect people are just upset with the CPC and LPC.

    By Anonymous Deb, at 10:51 a.m.  

  • The NDP learned with the prorogation event that attacking the Tories drives the Liberals up in the polls, which is likely why they backed off on Guergis.
    If they can present themselves as Canada's only progressive alternative, they might hold their support.
    The Liberals attacked Harper as a threat to women's abortion rights in the last three federal elections and lost ground everytime. Being the brilliant strategists that they are, they attacked Harper as a threat to African abortions and have gone nowhere.

    By Blogger nuna d. above, at 12:17 p.m.  

  • The Liberals are just flailing around - Guergis, abortion, GG. Maybe they land a punch every now and then, but they don't look like a party ready to govern.

    So any punch they do land means more votes for the NDP.

    By Anonymous Sean, at 4:15 p.m.  

  • While this is bad news for the Liberals, it doesn't look good for Harper either. What Jaffergate demonstrates is that Harper's control over his MP's is on the wane. That tends to happen when MP's reason that the cost of pissing off the boss is smaller than the cost of "goin' rogue" or "going on the take". Moreover, Harper appears to be out of new ideas. It all reminds me of the last days of the Chretien administration.

    The only thing preventing a collapse in Tory numbers is the strong performance of the Canadian economy. However, those conditions are somewhat artificial. Economies tend to experience strong growth immediately after a recession, and interest rates remain low.

    If I were Ignatieff I would wait till after Carney raises interest rates before making any bold moves. It isn't that this news of the day stuff is irrelevant. However, the Liberals need to link scandals to pocketbook issues in order to make headway.

    By Blogger french wedding cat, at 10:49 p.m.  

  • Wanted to comment on why by (RxR) and 308 projections are so far off in terms of Liberal wins:

    308 uses a long-term weighting of all polls going back weeks, and even months. Some polls from 2009 are still being counted. RxR uses a simple factor system. Each poll is factored down (right now to a factor of 6) and then added into the last projection. This means that there can be and usually is more and quicker movement.

    Example. Party A sits on 50% in a province. A new poll shows them at 60%. We factor that down (in our case, by 6), or another way to think of it, is factor the existing result up. This means we add 50, 6 times, and 60 once. 50+50+50+50+50+60. Then, since we used a total of 7 counts, we divide by 7, which brings us to 51.4% You will also find that 1.4% (the increase) is 1/7th (6+1) of the difference (10%) between the two figures.

    This, in short, makes our projection "move" faster in response to newer polls.

    Once the election begins, we will weight polls from each firm separately, and then combine them into one. As it stands right now, if a particular firm puts out data twice as often as another, it will have twice as large an impact on our numbers. While this is not completely destructive outside of an election, inside one we would of course wish to focus our results as close as possible.

    By Blogger Unknown, at 1:44 a.m.  

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