Thursday, August 5, 2010

Liberals/Conservatives in statistical draw

What does this mean? No election for a while. The Conservatives have made some significant missteps recently – on odd issues, like the census – but missteps nevertheless.

The Liberal Express is having a good effect and slowly slowly Canada is learning about our policies.

BUT, neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals would be clear winners in an election now and summer polls are not always the most accurate – I can’t imagine anyone triggering an election anytime soon.

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's Conservatives have virtually lost their lead over the opposition Liberals, according to a poll showing support for the ruling party below 30 percent for the first time since late 2006.

The Ekos survey for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, released on Thursday, put the Conservatives at 29.7 percent in popular support, down from 32.2 percent in the previous reading.

That puts the party in a statistical draw with the Liberals, who rose to 28.5 percent from 26.4 percent. The main opposition party has been out of power since early 2006.

The Ekos poll is considered accurate to within 1.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd bet that the lead is still around 5-6 points. We've seen this kind of thing too many times.The numbers tightened in January only to predictably move back.


The 30 percent barrier might be cause for alarm for the cons. but as long as the Libs are weak there is no threat of an election. I agree with you on that one.People do not want one either.

Anonymous said...

Oh, people always say that they don't want an election then they care about the election call for maybe 48 hours and then cease caring.

But I'll agree with something that anon 12:58 said above, we've seen the the polls tighten to a statistical tie too many times only to snap back into the 5 point Tory lead territory within a matter of weeks. I'll feel optimistic about this poll result when we see two things happen...

1: Other pollsters show similar movement relative to their prior offering (Call it the refutation of the outlier possibility), and

2: We see this shift sustained over the next round of polls.