Angus Reid Poll

Angus Reid has put out a new poll giving the Conservatives a 34-30 lead over the Liberals. There are some interesting numbers from almost every region: the Tories are only at 20% in Atlantic Canada; the Grits and the Bloc are tied in Québec; the Greens are ahead of the NDP in Ontario (Cons and Libs par for the course there); the NDP is strong while the Liberals are weak in MB/SK.

But by far, the most striking numbers are in BC, where this poll has Conservatives 43%, NDP 28%, Liberals 19%, Greens 10%. The Tory result here is even better than the one in the Ipsos outlier (38%), while the Grits are even lower than the 20% they got in Harris-Decima's weird poll (that gave Greens 24% in BC). Incidentally, this is a low number for the Greens in BC, which is bad news for them since Angus and Nanos were the two firms that did not over-poll them in the last election (Nanos had them at a poor 11.1% in BC in its latest poll).

The BC numbers caused most of the action in my projection, which now gives:

CON - 122
LIB - 102
BQ - 47
NDP - 37

I have the NDP at the same number of seats as in 2008 (which is 8 more than in 2006) even though their national numbers are about 2% lower than in 2008 (and about 1% lower than in 2006). Essentially, the two provinces that matter for the NDP are BC and ON. In BC, compared to 2008, polls show the Tories losing ground and the Grits gaining support, while the NDP is roughly flat. Since most NDP contests in BC are with the Conservatives, this makes them gain seats. In ON, NDP losses are limited by the fact that many of their seats were won by a pretty comfortable margin in 2008. Furthermore, the fact that I use an arithmetic swing rather than a geometric swing helps the NDP retain most of their seats in my Ontario projection; I view this as reasonable since the NDP may benefit from being newly incumbent in most of their tight Ontario races.