Earlier this week, I wrote an article for the magazine L'Actualité. This article was written during the previous week-end and was mostly a "what's the current situation" 5 months before the next election. This week however, we got a couple of new polls.
First of all, the new Nanos (which is a rolling average over multiple weeks) finally agreed with the other pollsters by showing the NDP closer to 30% than 25%, the new Ipsos had all three parties within 1 point while the latest Abacus had the CPC slightly ahead of both the NDP and LPC. And today, the newest Ekos poll actually places the NDP first.
If you do an average of all these polls, you get projections very similar to the one from l'Actualité. Basically, it's a 3 way race with the CPC as favorite to win the most seats and the NDP favorite to finish second. But technically, all three parties could win the most seats.
However, let's focus only on the recent Ekos poll. This is by far the best one for the NDP and the only one to actually put this party ahead. So it's interesting to see what could happen if Ekos was right.
If we use this poll only, we get the following projections with, in order, the voting intentions, the seat projections with the 95% confidence intervals as well as the chances of winning the most seats.
If we use this poll only, we get the following projections with, in order, the voting intentions, the seat projections with the 95% confidence intervals as well as the chances of winning the most seats.
As you can see, the vote efficiency of the CPC wouldn't be enough to prevent the NDP from winning. Remember that I'm only using the Ekos numbers and this poll is the only one putting the NDP as high in Ontario in particular. This helps Thomas Mulcair quite a lot since winning the most seats while finishing 3rd in Ontario is definitely difficult.
Notice as well that based on this poll, the Liberals would actually have no chance to form the government. There again, other polls don't put Trudeau so much behind.
A majority seems out of reach of every party. It shouldn't be too surprising. If you are polled around 30%, even if we account for a possible underestimation by these polls, it's still way too low to get 169 seats.
Let's forget the exact numbers for a moment and look at the big picture. The NDP is currently enjoying a massive boost from the NDP win in Alberta (if you think it's something else causing this small orange wave, let me know). And while it might not last until October, all signals are green for the NDP. Harper's satisfaction numbers are low, Trudeau is free falling and pretty much every poll shows that the NDP has the highest vote ceiling (i.e: people who could vote for the NDP). Plus, Quebec is all but guaranteed (at this point at least) to provide the NDP with a massive head start in term of MPs (unless the Bloc miraculously bumps back up, a lot of seats are very safe for Mulcair in la Belle Province). Also, I said it before and I'll say it again, but I expect Mulcair to do a good campaign, especially during the debates.
The CPC won't crash and burn. This party has a core base of voters who will go out and vote on election day. I can't really foresee Harper getting anything less than 30% of the vote. No Prentice collapse in my opinion. On the other hand, getting 39% of the vote again might be out of reach. So the Tories are probably the easiest party to project. The question is really how will the NDP and LPC split the remaining votes. I think in particular that a lot of people are really looking for a "Anything but Conservative" way of voting. If the NDP can remain that high and so much ahead of the Liberals. this party will become the de facto ABC vote and that could hurt the Liberals tremendously. Trudeau really needs to do something as he can't afford to start the next election so much behind.
