We didn't have a lot of polls so far during this campaign, but it seems things are about to change with Nanos rolling their daily updates. For those of you who don't know, Nanos surveys 400 persons every evening and add them to its 3-days rolling average, dropping the 400 oldest interviews. This is a nice way to provide daily updates without ocurring the cost of a full size, 1200 respondents poll every day. What it also means is that numbers in those daily updates move slower, since by definition it is an average and 2/3 of it doesn't change over one day.This is why today's update is surprising. We see the Conservatives still very high, at 39.1%. But the surprise is to see the Liberals jumping 4 points, at 32.7%. On the other hand, the NDP's drop is the exact opposite, minus 4 points to 15.9%. To see such big changes, it means that the support for the NDP among the newly added respondent is really low. Or that it was a lot higher in the dropped off ones, or a combinantion of both of course. At the end, this is a bad trend for the NDP. Seems like the candidate in Elgin-Middlesex-London wasn't alone after all lol
Using this single poll, we get the displayed projections. Here is the pdf with the detailed projections. By the way, Nanos is merging Alberta and the Prairies together. In order to use this poll, I had to do some math in order to recover the vote intentions. Specifically, during the past 3 elections, the Conservatives' votes in Alberta was 1.13 times the percentages in the Alberta+Prairies. Doing the same calculations for all parties, I can then use this poll in the model. It's not perfect but it provides a good enough approximation.
You may be surprised to see that the Tories would still get as many as 147 seats despite the Liberals' surge, but if you look at the poll, you see an increased lead in Ontario, so that explains a lot of things. Of course, as always when using only one poll, be carefull not to be carried away. In particular, if you have to participate in an election pool, I still suggest to use the projections based on the average of all polls (which have been updated today by the way).
At the end, it's partially good news for the Liberals, even though they might want to still votes from the Conservatives and not only from the NDP. After all, a big part of getting a majority is the lead the first party ahs over the second. In this poll, this lead is still very comfortable for the Tories.
