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.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Nanos, Innovative: Liberals by 17, 20 in ON; Some Adjustments

Yesterday, I wrote that the 18-point Liberal ON lead in the EKOS poll was "almost certainly too large." Well, today, Nanos has the Liberals up by almost 17 points there, and an Innovative poll conducted late last week had the Liberals up by 20 points in Ontario! This explains the majority chatter in some pollsters' tweets - and from Justin Trudeau himself. This also explains why Trudeau asked for a majority in French: even if he were to win 90 seats in Ontario, he would still need a breakthrough in Québec, and no poll has had him higher than 31% there.

The blockbuster ON numbers boost the Liberal national lead to 6.7 and 8 points in these polls.

The unadjusted polling average retains a healthy amount of skepticism; it has the Liberals up by 3.7 points nationally, and by 10.5 points in ON. With the turnout adjustment, it's 1.0 and 7.3.

Two adjustments have been made to the projection model:

There have been two more riding polls by Oraclepoll in Northern Ontario, and they argue against that the Northern Ontario adjustment favouring the Liberals (which was based on Mainstreet's October 1 Ontario megapoll). These are on top of the Environics poll that made me cancel the adjustment for Kenora only. As a result, I have decided to cancel the Northern Ontario adjustment for all ridings. This benefits the NDP, and has a domino effect on the rest of Ontario so that things balance out:
- The City of Toronto adjustment (CON +5, LIB -5) is maintained.
- To balance things out, it's now CON -1 and LIB +1 in the 905, and CON -1.5 and LIB +1.5 in Ontario outside the GTA and Northern Ontario.

The other modeling change I'm making was planned all along: since there will be an avalanche of big polls in the coming days, there will be less need to include older polls to decrease statistical uncertainty. They will therefore be discounted more quickly. The 5 most recent polling days will continue to retain full weight. Up until yesterday, each earlier polling day had its weight reduced by 1/10, so that 9 days were counted at partial weight, for a total of 14 days with weight. Starting today, the number of days with partial weight will be reduced by 1 on the first update of each day. Thus, today's projection is based on 13 days of polling, etc. Sunday's morning projection will be based on 10 days of polling, and the final projection will be based on the last 9 days of polls (i.e. days 6-9, counting backwards, will be weighted at 0.8, 0.6, 0.4 and 0.2).

Unsurprisingly, due to the shift in Ontario, the new projection moved against the Conservatives:

CON - 129, -5 (33.2%, -0.2%)
LIB - 122, +4 (34.2%, +0.5%)
NDP - 82, +2 (22.7%, -0.1%)
BQ - 4, -1 (4.6%, -0.2%)
GRN - 1 (4.4%, +0.1%)

On these numbers, the Liberals have a 40% chance of being in the lead.

Without the turnout adjustment, the Liberals widen their lead:

LIB - 133 (35.1%)
CON - 113 (31.4%)
NDP - 84 (23.2%)
BQ - 7 (4.6%)
GRN - 1 (4.6%)

These numbers imply a 75% chance of the Liberals being ahead.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you happen to know if there is an Angus Reid poll coming up soon ? Same with Mainstreet. They were the last 2, I believe with conservatives close to the liberals so just curious on if all pollsters are seeing a similar trend.

Anonymous said...

Also, very interesting about the Ekos polling is a rise of the NDP in Quebec. What i find interesting about very recent Ekos results is the 25-30% support of the 18-34 age group for the conservatives. I'm wondering if that is suspect.

Election Watcher said...

I imagine that all major pollsters will want to have a final say.

Both EKOS and Nanos show the NDP recovering in QC, but Nanos shows a very slight recovery (well within the MoE) while EKOS used to have the NDP lower in QC than Nanos and now has it higher. It'll be interesting if others also put the NDP in the low 30s, or instead have it in the mid 20s (like Ipsos and Forum) - this could determine whether the Bloc regains official party status.