Nanos: Tories by 9.5; Innovative Research: Tories by 11; COMPAS: Tories by 21 (!)

Today's Nanos poll has the Liberals going from a slight disadvantage to a slight lead in Ontario, but dropping to their lowest level of the campaign in Québec, where the Bloc has recovered the ground lost. So, as usual, not much change.

Update: A commenter has provided me with the regional breakdown for the COMPAS poll. The numbers are very strong for the Conservatives across the board (not surprising given their 21% national lead), and weak for the Liberals (especially in Québec with just 13%).

We also have two one polls with incomplete results by Innovative Research and one by COMPAS. The only numbers I could find from the former poll are national figures for the three main parties, and they almost exactly correspond are close to recent polling averages. Therefore, I will ignore this survey in making projections, unless a regional breakdown is released later.

The COMPAS poll, however, is strange, but in its result and in the way it is reported. Firstly, the 21% Tory national lead is way out of whack with all other polls conducted since the start of the campaign. Second, the article describing the results gives no absolute support level: it just states the gap between the top two parties in each region.

How will I deal with the COMPAS poll in making projections if regional details are not released? As it turns out, what we know of the COMPAS regional results are only slightly more favourable to the Tories than polling averages, except in Ontario, where the 17% Conservative lead is triple that shown by other surveys. What I will do is simply to move one seat from the Liberals to the Conservatives in Ontario for the next few days, and otherwise ignore this poll.

With that adjustment in mind, Below is the most recent projection, which shows little change:

CON - 149 150
LIB - 80 78
BQ - 47 48
NDP - 32

The average Conservative national lead stays at 11% rises to 12.7% due to the COMPAS poll.

This morning, we also have results from flash polls about the debate by Ipsos and Léger. Both suggest that Harper "won", while Ignatieff and Layton were roughly tied. These are quite similar to Nanos' "leadership index" numbers since the start of the campaign. The Ipsos survey also suggests that Ignatieff was not selected as the winner by many voters that did not have an pre-debate opinion about who would perform better - these split between Harper and Layton. Still, the Liberal leader didn't lose his supporters.

All this suggests that there will not be much change in voting intentions in the aftermath of the debate. Therefore, the question for the rest of the campaign is likely: Conservative majority or minority? That is, unless something huge happens during the French debate tonight.