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.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Angus Reid: Tories Lead by 13

Angus Reid has released a huge poll of over 6,000 respondents, and it confirms the double-digit Conservative lead observed by five other polling firms recently. This poll's field work coincided in large part with the field work of the most recent EKOS poll. The latter is most probably an outlier, as it is the only recent one showing a modest Tory lead.

With a poll of this size, one would expect the results to approximate recent polling averages. That is indeed the case for BC, AB and QC. In Ontario, the results also correspond to recent averages within the margin of error, but they are on the favourable side for the Tories (13% lead). In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the Tories are significantly higher than suggested by most other recent polls, but the seat impact of this is minimal.

The most interesting numbers in this poll are from Atlantic Canada, where the size of the sample allows Angus Reid to break the results down by province. The main lesson, which is very useful for projections, is that the effect of the ABC campaign in Newfoundland and Labrador has vanished. Thus, the moderate shift to the Tories in Atlantic Canada since 2008 is actually a big shift in NL and a small one elsewhere.

Incorporating this new information into my projection brings the Liberals back to their worst moments in the fall of 2009:

CON - 149
LIB - 72
BQ - 53
NDP - 34

The Tory average national lead increases to 11.6%.

3 comments:

CanadianSense said...

Fall of 2008. Minor date error.

Election Watcher said...

Actually, both! I did mean fall of 2009 since I had projections then that were almost identical to the current one. But of course you're right that the fall of 2008 was also quite dismal for the Grits.

CanadianSense said...

I took the General election results as the worst. The by elections results were not better in fall 2009 as they went 0/4.