Latest national poll median date: October 20
Projections reflect recent polling graciously made publicly available by pollsters and media organizations. I am not a pollster, and derive no income from this blog.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Ipsos, EKOS, Forum, Nanos, Insights West: Liberal Lead Grows

And we have come to the last polls of the campaign.

Ipsos' last poll for Global shows stable numbers nationally and in ON compared to last week. The Liberals remain in front in Québec, and have crossed the 30% threshold, like in Nanos, Léger and Mainstreet. The Liberals are also at 40% in BC, which looks like an outlier.

EKOS' last poll showed some movement (well short of statistical significance, but still): the Liberal lead widened from 1.7% to 3.9%. None of the regional changes is that exciting (the Tory 15-point lead in BC shrank to a still-large 10-point lead). However, the Liberals erased the gap with the Tories among seniors. Note that Ipsos, Mainstreet and Forum (below) show the same thing. Only Angus Reid, on which my turnout adjustment is partly based, has the Tories still doing well among seniors.

Forum's last poll shows a 10-point lead for the Liberals, and led Forum to project a Liberal majority! The most shocking numbers are in Québec, where Forum has the Liberals well in front at 36%, while the three other main parties are all in the 19-22% range.

Nanos' last poll has a bigger sample, so Nanos provided the national numbers for each day. The Liberal national lead was 8.6-8.7% on both Saturday and Sunday. There were no big regional variations from the last Nanos poll.

Finally, Insights West provided polls of Alberta and BC that are consistent with the polling average.

The following is NOT the final projection. Two things still need to be done:
- I will go through the country riding-by-riding.
- I will chew on the excellent Liberal numbers from today and the fact that the senior gap has been erased. I will probably end up putting even more weight on recent numbers and reducing the turnout adjustment.
Therefore, I expect the final projection to be somewhat more favourable to the Liberals than the projection below:

LIB - 139, +9 (36.5%, +1.1%)
CON - 124, -3 (32.7%, -0.3%)
NDP - 67, -5 (20.7%, -0.9%)
BQ - 7, -1 (4.8%)
GRN - 1 (4.3%, +0.1%)

These numbers imply a roughly 65-70% chance of a Liberal win, including a 3-5% chance of a Liberal majority.

The unadjusted projection is:

LIB - 147 (37.6%)
CON - 113 (31.1%)
NDP - 68 (21.3%)
BQ - 9 (4.7%)
GRN - 1 (4.5%)

These unadjusted numbers imply a roughly 85% percent chance of a Liberal win, including a 10% chance of a Liberal majority.

So, still to come overnight:
- Final projection
- List of projected winner in each riding (hopefully on a map, but I'm tired...)
Unfortunately, I do not expect to have time to provide a guide to strategic voting.

Tomorrow:
- Roundup of projections around the web
- Things to watch on election night
- Around 9:00-9:15pm EDT (just before polls close in most of the country): Updated projection based on Atlantic results

3 comments:

Gideon said...

How much are you going to reduce the turnout adjustment? I wonder if it's worth noting that Lynton Crosby was helping the Conservatives, and this guy is really good at getting hard-line conservatives to come out and vote and also really good at identifying and targeting important swing areas.

Anonymous said...

Just looked through the whole Insights west poll, they are as partisan as leadNow is being accused of. Nowhere on Vancouver Island but the Saanich gulf Islands and Victoria are the Greens ahead of anyone ...its amazing that their polls even get included for weighting...political hacks

Election Watcher said...

@Gideon: Just about 1/5 - but by now you've probably read that.

@Anonymous: What do you mean? The poll doesn't have the Greens ahead anywhere either. And while the 26% on Vancouver Island might be a bit high, that shouldn't be surprising given the sample size (1007 in BC, so one guesses only 170 or so on Vancouver Island).