The Road to 50: Tracking and regional polls
The Zerb wonders about polling given that so many journalists are innumerate. Greg Staples is looking at the SES leadership index to find signs of life in the CPC/Harper campaign.
Me, well I am looking at the SES December 19 numbers: 38 Lib, 29 CPC, 16% NDP and the regional breakdowns which - while they have a substantially higher margin of error, are interesting for trend:
Atlantic Lib 54, CPC 26, NDP 21 (+/-10)
Quebec Lib 32, CPC 10, Bloq 49 (+/-6)
Ontario Lib 46, CPC 32, NDP 19 (+/-6)
West Lib 32, CPC 42, NDP 19 (+/-5)
What the regionals are suggesting, and have been suggesting for some time, is that the CPC is not very close in Ontario and the Maritimes. About the only thing slowing the Liberals down is the NDP’s strength. However, as election day nears it is a good bet that the CLC will wheel out Buzz to explain strategic voting again and while the NDP popular support will only take a modest hit, where it counts, a good number of people are going to switch their NDP vote to the Liberals.
In the West the CPC looks pretty strong but here the question is voting efficiency. I’ve no doubt that Monte Solberg will take Medicine Hat with 70 or 80% of the vote and that this pattern will be repeated in many Alberta and Interior British Columbia ridings. Which will soak up the ten point CPC margin in the West before they actually hold any marginal seats or come close to winning any new ones.
In Quebec, the two questions are will the Bloq take 50% of the popular vote and will the Liberals manage to hang on to the shrinking perimeter of their Montreal redoubt. Is there enough money and enough ethnics to see the Liberals home with, say, 15 seats? I am hoping the Liberals are beaten back to Westmount simply because they need to understand how fundamentally Adscam has alienated Quebeckers.
Harper has been having a wonderful campaign. No gaffes, lots of interesting policy iniatives, a much greater sense of assurance — and it simply does not matter. As I predicted months ago, the SSM albatros is hung from his neck with a Kevlar rope. It is becoming the touchstone issue I suspected it would be.
If Harper and the CPC had gone with the idea that individual rights lie at the heart of modern conservatism they would have been able to diffuse this issue. It would have represented a genuinely fresh approach to the nature of governance and politics in Canada and it would have set an agenda which the Liberals could not have matched.
As it stands, the CPC is stuck with an incoherent platform plank which the Liberals gleefully are using as a proxy for the entire socon agenda.
Pathetic.
The only good news is that my own analysis suggests that we are going to have a Liberal minority, a Bloq Official Opposition and new leaders for bboth the Liberal and the Conservative parties.
Written by jay on December 20th, 2005 with
2 comments.
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herringchoker
#1. December 22nd, 2005, at 10:45 PM.
Hi Jay,
I like looking at the SES regional numbers too, but I prefer to look at them over time. My favourite numbers are the Atlantic numbers. One day the Grits are ahead of the Tories by 25 points, the next day by 5 points. That’s what happens when your nightly sample size is 40. The Grits have been the leaders in Atlantic opinion surveys since 1988, but it doesn’t always play out in seat totals (although it did in 1993).
The real question is what’s happening on the ground? Which seats are the Grits going to take from the opposition on Jan 23rd? By all accounts, none. There is not one opposition seat east of Quebec City that is in any serious danger of falling to the Grits this time. (in 2004, only two incumbents lost their seats in Atl. Can. One Tory and one Tory turned Grit). In fact, down here the Grits are playing defence, trying to hang on to what they have now. If the national numbers have both big parties in the 30s on Election Day, I expect that the Grits will be five seats lighter down here (3 Tory, 2 NDP), if not more.
I know you have a theory that SSM will work against the Tories, but it might help to look at which seats those 40 Liberal dissenters represented. For the most part they were from Atl Can and rural Ontario, those places that pine for the Tony Blair solution to SSM (which also happens to be Harper’s position, then and now). Every time Martin opens his mouth about SSM (even in half-assed manner), a lot of his MPs shift uncomfortably in their seats. The same is true, I expect, for the big blue belt in Ontario, those 50 or so seats that are traditionally Conservative. What’s sauce for Toronto is not necessarily sauce for Orillia, and Bracebridge. Those are the numbers that the SES polls don’t reflect, the small town/big city preferences in Ontario. Such is the problem with polling. The irony of this is that, even though the Tories will likely pickup additional seats in Ontario (I’m not going to posit any opinions about BC), it’s not likely to change much with SH’s promised free vote. Replacing a civil union Liberal with a civil union Tory doesn’t change very much in Parliament, but it does give the Alex Munter’s of this world something to talk about.
Cheers
Dave