Projection Update: Waiting for corroboration
Liberals tick up in the Poll Tracker but polling clarity still lacking.
So, are the Liberals are on the upswing or not?
It’s still too early to say.
Yes, the debate that has been swirling among the kind of folks who read newsletters like this one continues unabated, as we all search for signs of corroboration or refutation of the dramatic polling swing that has been recorded by EKOS Research. Sadly, we lack either as no other major polling firm has put out national numbers over the last week.
This week’s update to the Poll Tracker that I’m running for the CBC accordingly shows only an incremental change in the numbers. The model is designed not to overreact to individual polls, particularly when they are out-of-step with the ‘consensus’. But the addition of EKOS (and some other numbers) to the model has pulled the Liberals up — and away from the prospect of a third-place finish.
The Conservatives still lead in the Poll Tracker with 44.4%, down slightly from last week. The Liberals are up half of a point to 22.5%, representing a gain of more than two points since Justin Trudeau’s resignation on January 6. The NDP continues its slide and now stands at 17.5%, down two points since the beginning of the month. Interestingly, the Conservatives have held steady over that period — nearly all of the movement has been NDP-to-Liberal (at least in the aggregate).
But what to make of the continuing polling discrepancy? Federal numbers from an Ontario-only poll from Mainstreet Research also show a big gain for the Liberals. We haven’t seen anything from anyone else and the Nanos Research rolling poll includes four-week-old data, so it’ll take a few more weeks before it can provide some clarity on what is happening now. But just a few days ago David Coletto of Abacus Data said he still sees something around a 20-point Conservative lead, so while it is possible we’ll see a smaller Conservative advantage in the next Abacus poll, it doesn’t seem likely that lead will be in the single-digits.
It’s important to note that both EKOS and Mainstreet use automated polling. EKOS uses interactive voice response, which means automated dialling of phone numbers, pre-recorded messages and respondents who punch their answers into their phone’s keypad. Mainstreet now uses text messages to invite respondents to complete a survey online. It used IVR in past elections. Abacus (and Léger, Ipsos and other major pollsters) rely on online panels to conduct its polling.
This isn’t the first time (and it won’t be the last) that we have seen this kind of divergence between polling methodologies. This happened in the 2021 federal election, when EKOS and Mainstreet showed more dramatic swings during that campaign than the online pollsters did.
I wrote about this in my chapter on polling that I contributed to The Canadian Federal Election of 2021. Here’s a chart I included in the chapter. On the left, you’ll see the trendline for Léger’s polling during the campaign. On the right, you’ll see the trendline for EKOS’s polling.
There are two takeaways from these charts:
There is far more variation in the EKOS trendline than in Léger’s trendline.
The trendlines are broadly the same, showing the Liberals losing their lead over the Conservatives and then moving back into a neck-and-neck race.
During the campaign, Léger always had the Conservative, Liberal and NDP results within a band of three percentage points for each party. For EKOS, the difference between the Conservatives’ best and worst results was 10 points. It was eight points for the Liberals. Those are far wider swings.
This is not to say who is right and who is wrong — but rather to explain why we might be seeing these dramatic swings in the EKOS poll while we haven’t gotten a whiff of such significant movement from any online poll (at least, not yet). Are the Liberals really cresting 30% support? Maybe, maybe not. It seems likely they are experiencing an uptick of some sort, and we’ll get a clearer read on it once we get more data from a broader array of pollsters. There’s no rush — no one is voting this week!
The Conservative seat projection range has dipped a little, but is still well over the majority threshold. What’s significant this week is that the Liberal floor is 43 seats, one seat above the Bloc’s ceiling. If this holds, the Liberals could be confident that they will at least finish second.
The NDP has dropped to between 15 and 33 seats, with the projection being 21 for the party. That would represent a loss of four seats compared to the 2021 results.
A lot of this is being driven by Ontario, where EKOS and Mainstreet have registered a big gain for the Liberals. Here is what the trendline looks like in the province over the last year:
As you can see, the Conservatives have hardly budged. But the Liberals and NDP were at 23% and 20%, respectively, at the beginning of the month. It’s now 28% to 18%. The next set of Ontario numbers from the online pollsters is what I’ll be most interested to see when they next publish.
You can see all the findings from the Poll Tracker here and seat-by-seat projections here.