Tories destined for a majority: Pollster

By ANTONELLA ARTUSO QMI AGENCY

Stephen Harper's Conservatives have gained a massive 21-point lead over Michael Ignatieff's Liberals, according to a new COMPAS Research poll obtained exclusively by QMI Agency.

In Ontario, the Liberals trail their Conservative opponents in every area of the province except Toronto — although Harper leads in the city's suburbs.

The poll, the largest telephone survey of the campaign, also found that Ignatieff is trailing both the Conservatives and the NDP in Quebec, as NDP Leader Jack Layton shows some surprising strength in the province.

Pollster Conrad Winn said Harper is particularly strong in Ontario and all points west.

"The way things are going, he's destined for a majority," Winn said. "The only chance they have is to prevent him from forming a majority, and for that they would need far higher public confidence in the leaders of the opposition than exists."

The COMPAS poll results differ from other recent surveys that found the Conservatives were about nine points ahead of the Liberals, although most appear to place Harper in at least minority government territory.

The Liberals are a distant second place in Alberta and Ontario, but only three points behind in the Atlantic provinces.

Layton's New Democrats are stronger than the Liberals in B.C., Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

And in what Winn calls one of the most interesting revelations, the New Democrats are doing relatively well in Quebec.

The Conservatives are fighting it out for first place in Quebec City and Eastern Quebec; the NDP is a contender in Montreal and the rest of Quebec, the poll says.

"New Democrats have been praying for openings in Quebec for half a century," Winn said. "It's like a man lost in the desert praying for rain. Occasionally, the prayer works."

Bloc support in Quebec tops that of the second place Conservatives by 12 percentage points.

In Ontario, the Conservatives lead the Liberals by 17 points, although they trail in Toronto. The NDP has strength in the northern part of the province.

The Conservatives dominate in Manitoba and Saskatchewan with a 35-40 point lead, the poll found.

The Atlantic provinces give Harper only a small edge because people are concerned about his plans to cut spending, Winn said.

Alberta, always fertile vote-hunting ground for the Conservatives, shows Harper with a 50-point lead.

B.C. voters polled favour the Conservatives by 20 points.

"Falling short of a Kim Campbell-style shellacking, the Liberals nonetheless face the prospect of a historic shutout in French Quebec and being limited to islands of support in Atlantic Canada, English-speaking Montreal, the City of Toronto, parts of southern and eastern Ontario, and parts of Vancouver," a poll analysis says.

The COMPAS poll surveyed 2,300 voters by telephone April 6-11, and is considered accurate within 2.1 percentage points.

http://www.winnipegsun.com/news/decision2011/2011/04/12/17974236.html

Well, let's keep our fingers crossed, as we desperately need a majority government to stop all that bickering so we can get on with moving our economy forward.

The world is looking at us for leadership in the economic recovery. We cannot allow a couple of political punks to jeopardize this imo.

This is developing nicely. I peg a Cons majority at 75% now.

75% of the seats or a 75% certainty of a majority?

75% probability of a Conservative majority.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011


So I heard some polls came out today



Two contradictory polls made a splash today, one by EKOS and the other by COMPAS. A lot of Twitter ink has been spilled over these polls, as COMPAS shows a 21-point gap and EKOS a gap of only five points. But my daily poll summaries cover the polls that have been newly added to the projection. As both EKOS and COMPAS came out late this morning, they were not added to the projection. I will cover them in detail tomorrow.

http://threehundredeight.blogspot.com/2011/04/so-i-heard-some-polls-came-out-today.html







Wednesday, April 13, 2011


So I heard some polls came out today



Two contradictory polls made a splash today, one by EKOS and the other by COMPAS. A lot of Twitter ink has been spilled over these polls, as COMPAS shows a 21-point gap and EKOS a gap of only five points. But my daily poll summaries cover the polls that have been newly added to the projection. As both EKOS and COMPAS came out late this morning, they were not added to the projection. I will cover them in detail tomorrow.

But I will say a few things now. We're all very familiar with EKOS. They have a good track record, being one of the top five pollsters in my ranking of 24 Canadian firms, and they have been active in this campaign. We can use the polls they have already released in this campaign to take a look at trends and see where the parties are going. COMPAS, on the other hand, does not conduct regular voting intentions polls. In fact, since 2003 I only have records of them being active in two election campaigns within four weeks of election day, and the last one was in the 2005 Alberta provincial election.

The biggest problem is that we have nothing to compare this COMPAS poll to, and are thus unable to identify any trends. If they report again in this campaign and peg the Conservatives at 41% instead of 45%, while other pollsters also show a Tory drop, then we'll have something to chew on. But without something to compare their results to, and with them coming to a very different conclusion than what other pollsters have found, the usefulness of this poll is very limited.

Nanos, on the other hand, continues to be useful. And I'll also take this opportunity to look at how the polls have been moving in battleground Ontario since the beginning of the campaign.In this poll of eligible Canadian voters conducted for CTV and The Globe and Mail, Nanos finds that not much has changed. The firm did report a Conservative drop for Monday, perhaps a result of the leaked G8 report, but the numbers seem to have held firm since then. They continue to lead with 39.9%, ahead of the Liberals to 30.4%. No statistically significant shifts have occured, and since Nanos's last complete three-day poll ending on April 9 the changes have been infinitessimal.

It's the same thing at the regional level, though a swap of support between the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois is of some interest. In Quebec, the Bloc has gained 5.5 points since yesterday and now leads with 38.6%. That is the best result in any Nanos poll for the Bloc during this campaign - could this be the Tout le monde en parle effect? Gilles Duceppe was on the show on Sunday night, though I thought his performance was only average.

The Liberals, meanwhile, have dropped 4.8 points to 16%, behind both the Tories and the NDP. Not even these shifts are truly statistically significant, but they could be the start of a trend that could be worth watching. Indeed, the Liberals have dropped for three consecutive days in Quebec in Nanos's daily tracking.

The party is on the upswing in Ontario, however, and that might be the story of the campaign so far.

In that province, Nanos puts the Liberals at 41.3% to the Conservatives' 40.1%.
When the campaign started, the Conservatives had a clear edge over the Liberals in Ontario. That edge widened in the first days of the campaign as the Conservatives pushed 45% to the Liberals' 33%. But since the beginning of April the Conservatives have sunk back to around 42%, and have been there since April 2nd. They've even dropped below 42% and have been running around 40-41% in the province since the 7th.

The Liberals, on the other hand, have been steadily gaining to the point where they have overtaken the Conservatives today. Granted, adding COMPAS's poll will probably push the Tory numbers up, but EKOS found the race in Ontario be close as well, so we should expect this trend to continue in the chart.

The New Democrats have suffered the most at the hands of the Liberals, dropping from around 17% from March 29th to April 3rd down to around 13%. They've since recovered a little, but are far from the high of 19-20% they had in the first days of the campaign. They're now at around 15% in Ontario, giving the Liberals the ability to close in on the Tories. The Greens have also made more room for the frontrunners.

It is difficult to estimate where this NDP support sits geographically. I would speculate that the New Democrats are dropping in ridings where they don't stand a good chance o

Time permitting, I hope to add these regional/provincial analyses to my daily poll summaries. I'll take a look at Quebec next, and be sure to check back here tomorrow to see how the new EKOS, COMPAS, and Nanos polls shift the projection.



That's not the way polls work. They are snapshots in time. Extrapolating lines on bar graphs assuming a "trend" will continue is a mistake.

I especially enjoyed these completely non-partisan, non-leading questions:

"After a sharp decline in liberal support in the election [2008] and an increase in Conservative support, the Liberals are wrong to try to gain power by teaming up with the NDP and the Bloc"

"The Liberals, NDP and Bloc are trying to cheat the voters, who made clear their choices in the recent election."




EKOS has released two-day polls before. I believe they did the same thing last week. It's a sneak peek of their longer-term poll that they will release on Friday.



From the COMPAS web site.

"Interviewees who respond that they are undecided about how they intend to vote are then asked to whom they are “leaning.” This second question is known as the leaner question.
Among respondents who reveal their vote intention at the first question, Harper leads by more than 2:1 but this falls short of 4:3 among those responding to the leaner Federal Opinion Polling Trends (April 12)







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1 Poll Federal Seat Projection Harris-Decima 10/04/11

Mods, can you please adjust the title of the thread to reflect that this refers to a FEDERAL Tory majority. As there is both a provincial and federal election this year, it's somewhat deceiving when I think this is a reference to the provincial tories getting my hopes us, but only to be disappointed as it relates to the federal election.

Ahhh...it's in the Federal Election heading, so that should tip you off no?

Deceiving?

After the first disappointment did ya readjust your comprehension?

I think edwin is pulling our collective legs...