Liberals jump out to 6 point lead ahead of Conservatives in latest Ipsos poll

[canada-man]

With less than a week to go, the federal election campaign is heading into the home stretch and the Liberals are now six points ahead of the Conservatives, according to a new Ipsos poll conducted for Global News.

“At the national level the Liberals have surged ahead to 37 per cent, the Conservatives have remained steady at about 31 per cent. But where the big change has happened is with the NDP,” whose support continues to drop, said Ipsos senior vice-president John Wright.

The Liberals were the only party trending upwards according to the latest numbers, and Trudeau received 37 per cent of the decided vote, up five points from last week. The Conservative party would receive 31 per cent of the vote (down two points) if an election were held today, while Tom Mulcair and the NDP continue their downward slide and would receive 24 per cent of the vote (down two points), according to the poll.

Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois continue to hold at five per cent while the Green Party receives just two per cent support.

http://globalnews.ca/news/2273978/l...-ahead-of-conservatives-in-latest-ipsos-poll/




http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/election/latest-nanos-tracking-has-liberals-in-the-lead-1.2605974

The latest nightly tracking by Nanos Research for CTV News and The Globe and Mail completed on the holiday weekend has the Liberals in the lead at 35.7 per cent.
Tracking released on Oct. 12 shows:
• The Liberals at 35.7 per cent support nationally
• The Conservatives at 28.9 per cent support nationally
• The NDP at 24.3 per cent support nationally
• The Greens at 4.8 per cent support nationally
Respondents were asked: "If a federal election were held today, could you please rank your top two current local voting preferences?"

The latest regional numbers:
• Atlantic Canada - Liberals (52.9 per cent), NDP (21.3 per cent), Conservatives (16.5 per cent), Greens (9.3), based on 110 decided individuals. A sample of 110 respondents is accurate ±9.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
• Quebec – NDP (32.7 per cent), Liberals (28.7 per cent), Bloc Quebecois (23.2 per cent), Conservatives (14.0 per cent), Greens (0.8), based on 268 decided individuals. A sample of 268 respondents is accurate ±6.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
• Ontario – Liberals (45.2 per cent), Conservatives (32.7 per cent), NDP (18.2 per cent), Greens (3.3 per cent), based on 325 decided individuals. A sample of 325 respondents is accurate ±5.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
• Prairies – Conservatives (47.7 per cent), Liberals (26.5 per cent), NDP (24.2 per cent), Greens (1.7 per cent), based on 222 decided individuals. A sample of 222 respondents is ±6.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
• British Columbia – Conservatives (29.1 per cent), Liberals (28.9 per cent), NDP (25.0 per cent), Greens (14.9 per cent), based on 169 decided individuals. A sample of 169 respondents is accurate ±7.6 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Accessible Vote
When asked a series of independent questions as to whether they would vote for each federal party:
52.7 per cent of Canadians would consider voting for the Liberals
42.3 per cent of Canadians would consider voting for the NDP
38.1 per cent of Canadians would consider voting for the Conservatives
26.3 per cent of Canadians would consider voting for the Greens
34.3 per cent of Quebecers would consider voting for the Bloc Quebecois
Poll methodology
A national dual frame (land and cell) random telephone survey is conducted nightly by Nanos Research throughout the campaign using live agents. Each evening a new group of 400 eligible voters are interviewed. The daily tracking figures are based on a three-day rolling sample composed of 1,200 interviews. To update the tracking a new day of interviewing is added and the oldest day dropped. The margin of error for a survey of 1094 decided voters is ±3.0 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

 

[Moviefan-2]

It sure feels like the Liberals have this election in the bag.

 

[twizz]

Keep In My Mind Polls Should Be Taken With A Grain Of Salt

Election polls are fun, but they don’t mean a thing: pollstersPollsters even have some advice for media that report even the slightest shift in numbers: “You should really consider what is the basis for your addiction and maybe enter a ten-step program.”

JEFF MCINTOSH, THE CANADIAN PRESS

Conservative party leader Stephen Harper his wife Laureen Teskey, kids Ben and Rachel celebrate his election win in Calgary on Jan 23, 2006. Canadian pollsters are warning voters to take polls with a grain of salt should there be a federal election this spring.

Published on Feb 14 2011

Joan Bryden, THE CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA—Canada’s notoriously competitive pollsters have some surprisingly uniform advice about the parade of confusing and conflicting numbers they’re about to toss at voters ahead of a possible spring election: Take political horse race polls with a small boulder of salt.

“Pay attention if you want to but, frankly, they don’t really mean anything,” sums up Andre Turcotte, a pollster and communications professor at Carleton University.

He has even more pointed advice for news organizations that breathlessly report minor fluctuations in polling numbers: “You should really consider what is the basis for your addiction and maybe enter a ten-step program.”

And for fellow pollsters who provide the almost daily fix for media junkies: “I think pollsters should reflect on what this does to our industry. It cheapens it.”

Turcotte’s blunt assessment is widely shared by fellow pollsters, including those who help feed the media addiction to political horse race numbers.

Some of the most prominent pollsters are pondering ways to break the habit. They’re considering cutting back the number of media surveys they provide or even pooling resources to provide bigger, better quality polls at regular — but less frequent — intervals.

“The way it’s working now is a real dog’s breakfast. It’s not working,” says Ekos Research president Frank Graves, who provides bi-weekly surveys to the CBC.

There’s broad consensus among pollsters that proliferating political polls suffer from a combination of methodological problems, commercial pressures and an unhealthy relationship with the media.

Start with the methodological morass.

“The dirty little secret of the polling business . . . is that our ability to yield results accurately from samples that reflect the total population has probably never been worse in the 30 to 35 years that the discipline has been active in Canada,” says veteran pollster Allan Gregg, chairman of Harris-Decima which provides political polling for The Canadian Press.

For a poll to be considered an accurate random sample of the population, everyone must have an equal chance to participate in it. Telephone surveys used to provide that but, with more and more people giving up land lines for cellphones, screening their calls or just hanging up, response rates have plummeted to as little as 15 per cent.

Gregg says that means phone polls are skewing disproportionately towards the elderly, less educated and rural Canadians. Pollsters will weight their samples to compensate but that inevitably means “messing around with random probability theory” on which the entire discipline is based.

Just as pollsters made the transition to phone surveys from door-to-door polling, they’re now in the midst of another transition — to online polls. According to an industry survey by the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA), online polling supplanted telephone surveys in 2009.

Online polling can be extremely accurate for a survey of, say, readers of a specific newspaper. But they’re more controversial when it comes to surveys of the general population, which is what political polls purport to be.

An online poll is conducted using a sample taken from a panel of respondents set up by the polling company. The panel includes only those connected to the Internet, who tend to be younger, better educated and urban. Participants are self-selected and enticed by ads that sometimes offer small cash or other inducements.

As a result, the MRIA, the industry’s voluntary self-regulating body, warns that online poll results “may be skewed.” Under the association’s code of conduct, reporting margins of error, which can only be applied to random samplings of the entire population, is “misleading and prohibited” for Internet surveys.

But that hasn’t stopped some pollsters or media outlets from reporting margins of error for online surveys. Or from comparing results of phone polls to online polls, as if there were no difference.

Jaideep Mukerji, vice-president of public affairs for Angus Reid Public Opinion, which conducts online political surveys, argues they generally produce comparable or more accurate results than phone polls. He maintains that pure margins of error are no longer attainable for phone polls either, given the huge drop in response rates.

Gregg says both phone and Internet polls produce “highly imperfect” samples. There are ways to test how well a sample reflects the total population but that costs money so, instead, pollsters continue to use standard tables to calculate margins of error “as if we’re generating perfect samples and we’re not any more.”

So why do pollsters continue to trumpet their imperfect data to the media?

Money. Or more precisely, the lack of it.

When Gregg started polling in the 1970s, there were only a handful of public opinion research companies. Polls were expensive so media outlets bought them judiciously.

Now, Gregg laments almost anyone can profess to be a pollster, with little or no methodological training. There is so much competition that political polls are given free to the media, in hopes the attendant publicity will boost business.

Turcotte says political polls for the media are “not research anymore” so much as marketing and promotional tools. Because they’re not paid, pollsters don’t put much care into the quality of the product, often throwing a couple of questions about party preference into the middle of an omnibus survey on other subjects which could taint results.

And there’s no way to hold pollsters accountable for producing shoddy results since, until there’s an actual election, there’s no way to gauge their accuracy.

“I believe the quality overall has been driven to unacceptably low levels by the fact that there’s this competitive auction to the bottom, with most of this stuff being paid for by insufficient or no resources by the media,” concurs Graves.

“You know what? You get what you pay for.”

The problem is exacerbated by what Gregg calls an “unholy alliance” with the media. Reporters have “an inherent bias in creating news out of what is methodologically not news.” And pollsters have little interest in taming the media’s penchant for hype because they won’t get quoted repeatedly saying their data shows no statistically significant change.

“In fact, they do the exact opposite. They will give quotes, chapter and verse, and basically reverse and eat themselves the next week,” says Gregg.

http://m.thestar.com/#/article/news/canada/2011/02/14/election_polls_are_fun_but_they_dont_mean_a_thing_pollsters.html

 

[Butler1000]

And if anyone looked at the accuracy spread of the polls by region it was between 6-9%.

I can't call this one. 3.6 million pre votes. Going to be a wild night.

 

[SkyRider]

If the poll is accurate, this means 128 seats for Liberals and 122 for the Conservatives.

 

[james t kirk]

I'm good with a minority gov't.

They won't get too carried away then.

 

[Frankfooter]

I'm good with a minority gov't.

They won't get too carried away then.

Absolutely.
A lib/ndp minority would be fine.

 

[twizz]

Nanos is connected to The Globe and Mail so there has to be some truth to The Libs being in the lead. But I'm still skeptical as to.how close or far apart things actually are.

 

[fuji]

I'm good with a minority gov't.

They won't get too carried away then.

I am guessing that is what most Canadians want. Leading a minority government is a good way for a new leader to prove his merit while being kept on a leash. Voters gave Harper a minority before deciding to trust him with a majority.

Now Harper is too long in the tooth and we need a change of the guard. A minority is a good way to do that.

 

[Avatar]

Harper is finished unless he wins a majority

Absolutely.
A lib/ndp minority would be fine.

Even a Conservative minority is ok. It would not last. Ndp/Lib have already stated they will not support a Con minority.
Harper is finished unless he wins a majority - which is still possible despite what the polls say.

 

[glamphotographer]

Harper trying hard to hang on and win seats in Toronto. Sign of desperation when he props the Fords whom Harper's wife did not support Rob Ford for re-election for Toronto mayor.

http://toronto.ctvnews.ca/video?cli...binId=1.815892&playlistPageNum=1&binPageNum=1

 

[Frankfooter]

Even a Conservative minority is ok. It would not last. Ndp/Lib have already stated they will not support a Con minority.
Harper is finished unless he wins a majority - which is still possible despite what the polls say.

Its only possible because we don't know what dirty tricks Harper has still up his sleeves.
He cheated in the last two elections, tried to rig this one in his favour through funding rules, length, gerrymandering and caps on the investigative powers of Elections Canada.
He's a cheater we need to keep an eye on.

 

[LickingGravity]

A minority wouldn't bad. Beats giving the keys to the castle to a lightweight like Trudeau.

 

[bver_hunter]

A minority wouldn't bad. Beats giving the keys to the castle to a lightweight like Trudeau.

Just because Harper screwed up, so did you have enough?