Let’s check in on our friends at ThreeHundredEight.com and see how their helpful rolling chart of all public domain polls is coming along. The latest version is shown above.
The basic message of this chart seems to be that the three national political parties appear to be levelling off at their new post-Ignatieff-election-call numbers. As we discussed last time we looked at this chart, the Liberals and Conservatives seemed to be duelling for first place in the mid-30s through the winter and spring of 2009, while the New Democrats held stolidly to their support, perhaps a point or two off their 2008 election numbers. In June (perhaps coincidentally after the Liberal leadership convention that confirmed the current leader), the Liberals began a slow drop in support, while the Conservatives slowly consolidated.
In September, Mr. Ignatieff announced that Mr. Harper’s time was up. The Liberals numbers promptly collapsed, while Conservative numbers soared into squeaker-majority territory. The New Democrats, meanwhile, cleanly returned to their 2008 election result. It is early to judge, but in recent weeks it would seem that while the reds and the oranges may have stabilized, while the Conservatives appear to have peaked and are also returning to the 2008 election result.
ThreeHundredEight.com also has some interesting regional charts – let’s look at a few of them.
It bears saying, to begin, that the wild swings demonstrate why it is important not to conclude too much from regional numbers in any particular poll. But the trends over time, aggregating all of the publicly-available polling, are more credible.
Here is ThreeHundredEight.com’s chart for British Columbia.
Basically stable, except that the Liberals generally were in second place at the beginning of the chart, and are generally in third place now, behind Layton’s team.
Here is the Ontario chart.
The price the Liberals paid for the way they played their cards this fall is clear to see, although the Conservatives seems to have little recent momentum.
And here are the Quebec and Atlantic charts, which suggest that the Conservatives are seriously challenging the Liberals in both regions.
The NDP is holding on to its roughly 12 per cent support in Quebec, and is nicely competitive in the Atlantic.
If Layton continues to break away from the faltering B.C. Liberals, he would be able give the Conservatives a run for their money in many parts of that province. In Ontario, those numbers suggest that current Conservative and NDP Ontario MPs can be relatively confident of re-election, while Liberal MPs in marginal ridings would be in some trouble. The Quebec numbers are good news for the Bloc Quebecois unless the national parties concentrate and grow their support. At those levels, the Liberal vote in concentrated in anglophone ridings and isn’t going to change the electoral map. The NDP vote is likely strongest on the Island of Montreal and in the Outaouais – not a bad start. The Conservatives, as they demonstrated in last week’s by-elections, seem to be growing in rural Quebec. But the Bloc needs to drop a fair bit, in the right places and distributed the right way, for that party to be seriously dentable. In Atlantic Canada these numbers set up a series of unpredictable three-way races.
What does it all mean? Probably, that the current Parliament would be re-elected in roughly its present form if there was an election today. The Conservatives and New Democrats have done well this fall. But nobody is running away with the show.
