What happened in B.C., and what to do about it

The scandals in Toronto and Ottawa have pushed aside the existential questions from pollsters about the B.C. election, but the post-mortems on what happened in British Columbia are still emerging. An exit poll by Ipsos-Reid and a post-election survey by Insights West hint at some important clues.

I wrote about the issue of turnout, and in particular the profile of those who do vote, in my article for The Globe and Mail today. I suggest you read it, as I am only going to summarize here some of the points that are made in that piece.

Both the Ipsos-Reid and Insights West polls were able to replicate the final vote tally, suggesting that their polls are broadly reflective of actual B.C. voters.

Note: An earlier version of this post said that Ipsos-Reid's exit poll showed turnout by age. This is false - they weighted their exit poll from turnout in the 2009 B.C. election.

If we look at Ipsos-Reid's final poll of the campaign, we see that the three age groups they (and most other pollsters) use were more or less portioned out evenly. But when we see who actually voted in 2009 (and, conceivably, did so again in 2013), the problem with that sort of weighting is clear. Most significantly, voters 55 or older made up half of all voters, rather than one third.

If we compare Ipsos-Reid's final poll of the campaign to their exit poll, we see that the Liberals stole votes from the New Democrats in every age category.

But what struck me is how the results of the final poll from each age group were close to the exit poll's results in the older age group.

The 18-to-34-year-olds who voted had similar views to the 35-to-54-year-olds who were polled on the eve of the election, and the 35-to-54-year-olds who voted had similar views to the 55 and older respondents of the final poll. It would seem that people who vote are more like the broader, older population than those who do not. Anecdotally, that makes a lot of sense to me in a low turnout election.

So did the pollsters get the B.C. election wrong? Yes and no - they may have been in the ballpark when it came to the general population, but they failed to correct for the voting population. In the end, the polls were meant to determine likely outcomes of the campaign. To put it in the context of the market research that is the bread-and-butter of polling firms, the failure to identify voters and how they felt about the campaign was equal to a failure to identify a company's likely customer base, and how they feel about an advertising campaign. A poll is of little use to a diaper company if it is identifying the shopping habits of childless adults, and especially adults who have no intention of having children.

A side note: Ipsos-Reid posts their weighted and unweighted sample sizes in all of their polls, which makes it possible to do this sort of analysis. Other pollsters absolutely must do the same. When I looked at Forum's last poll, the same amount of information is not available, but it is possible to reverse-engineer some of their weightings. It seems that Forum uses a similar weighting scheme as Ipsos-Reid does (as they should if they are trying to match the census data). If they hadn't, however, and merely reported the voting intentions of those who responded to their poll, they would have had the Liberals at 43% to 41% for the NDP. Forum seems to report its unweighted sample sizes, and from that we can determine that 66% of Forum's final sample was over the age of 55. That appears to be way too much. But perhaps, in some cases, the people who answer a telephone poll will more closely resemble the people who vote. This does seem to make some intuitive sense, as these days it requires a generosity of civic duty and time to submit to a random telephone poll (and vote), whereas an online poll might attract a different kind of person.

But turnout was not the only factor contributing to the miss. Alberta had a dramatic change of heart in the final days and hours of the campaign, and that was responsible for some of the error in polling there. In British Columbia, there might have been a more modest change of heart that amplified the errors made in identifying likely voters.

According to the Insights West post-election poll, 11% of voters made their final decision on election day, including 12% of B.C. Liberal voters. The poll found that 17% of Liberal voters had even considered voting NDP prior to casting a ballot, enough to drop the Liberals to about 36% or 37% support if all of them had stuck with the NDP. That just happens to be the consensus level of support the Liberals had going into election day.

The Ipsos-Reid exit poll echoed the Insights West poll in finding that 11% of voters had made up their minds on May 14, and the 9% result they had for the B.C. Liberals is quite close to the Insights West result as well.

The exit poll found that 11% of Liberal voters had intended to vote NDP during an earlier part of the campaign, a not dissimilar result to Insights West's post-election poll. But this is not a magic bullet, as 8% of NDP voters said they intended to vote Liberal at some point in the campaign. It sort of cancels things out, but the fact that 33% of Green voters said they had at one point considered voting NDP may put the balance back into a shifting electorate that swung a few points' worth in the final 36 hours of the campaign. It is not enough to explain the total error, but combined with the turnout issue it might explain much of it.

Why did the switch occur? Insights West seems to suggest that a lot of it had to do with the perception that the Liberals were better on the economy and had run a better campaign, as well as a lack of trust in Adrian Dix. These issues were identified as one of the contributing factors in their decision to move from the NDP to the Liberals by more than one-third of the switchers. Ipsos-Reid also found that the issues of debt, the economy, and government spending were major vote drivers for the B.C. Liberals.

Another factor that cannot be ignored, and one that is especially problematic for the polling industry as a whole, is the expectation that voters had going into their polling stations. The polls set the tone for the campaign, but misled voters with potentially significant consequences.

In the Ipsos-Reid exit poll (recall that it was taken during election day before the results were known) fully 48% of voters expected the New Democrats to win a majority government. Another 28% expected a minority government of one shade or another, while a bare 11% correctly thought the B.C. Liberals would win a majority.

Even among Liberal voters, only 22% thought they were casting a ballot for the party that would form the next majority government, while 60% thought they voting for a losing cause or, at best, a minority government. New Democrats went in with much more confidence, of course, with 75% expecting a majority and only 1% thinking the Liberals would pull off the win.

More significant, however, may be what the British Columbians who cast a ballot for the Greens and Conservatives thought would happen. A majority of Greens thought the NDP would win outright, while a plurality of Conservatives thought the same. A significant number of Greens and Conservatives thought the next government would be a minority one, giving a Green or Conservative MLA a lot of influence. But only 11% of Conservatives and 2% of Greens thought the Liberals would win a majority. Considering that, according to the poll, 72% of Green voters and 87% of Conservative voters thought that Christy Clark did not deserve to be re-elected, would they have voted differently if the polls were predicting a majority victory by the Liberals?

This is why the pollsters have an important responsibility to get their election calls right, which means a greater emphasis on ensuring they have proper models in place to estimate turnout. But according to most pollsters, that is a huge challenge.

A quick note on who had the best internal polls. Clearly, the New Democrats were not well-served by the polls since they expected victory. The B.C. Liberals may have been better served, but we cannot know for sure if their internal pollsters are highlighting where they went right and not mentioning where they went wrong. This is one of the reasons why public polls are needed, as otherwise all we'd know about the state of the race is the leaked (and spun) internal numbers from each of the campaigns.

But in terms of methodology, there does seem to be a clear difference. The NDP appears to have been relying on province-wide polling, as those in the media were, and were deceived by the numbers (as those in the media were). The Liberals, on the other hand, appear to have identified some 30 swing ridings and polled them furiously, ignoring those ridings considered safe or not in play. From these polls, they were able to identify how the campaign was going more precisely. This seems to have been the successful method used by the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta as well - tighter, deeper polling, the sort that media outlets cannot afford.

What the rest of us can do about it

What are we to do, then? We cannot hope to have the sort of in-depth polling that political campaigns have since the newspapers and television networks that commission polls cannot afford anything of that quality, while the polls that are given away for free also have to be done on the cheap.

If disclosure and transparency increased, those of us who are interested and have the time to do so can parse through the data more closely and derive whatever information we are looking for. That is one thing that can be easily done, is done elsewhere and should be required in Canada. If any government MPs are reading this, a change to the Election Act would be appreciated!

But for myself, I have to take a different approach to the polls and the forecasts that are published here. For the next campaign - which looks likely to be in Nova Scotia, which should (hopefully) be a less problematic one as the Halifax-based Corporate Research Associates have a good track record - I am considering what new methods I can employ.

The seat projection model needs nothing more than minor tweaking, the sort that takes place after each election when more information is available (i.e., the performance of independents). The focus needs to be on ensuring the numbers plugged into the model are more accurate.

But is there anything I can do? Estimating these sorts of swings and error levels before they occur is virtually impossible, and I am just as likely to miss it one way and make the projections worse as I am to get it right. Instead, I will hope that the pollsters do improve their turnout models and I will report the aggregates without any adjustment - a forecast that is entirely based on what the polls are saying.

That will be the base, but I need to have some means to give readers an idea of how the polls could be wrong. In the B.C. election, I calculated those estimates with the polls themselves. The projection was based on the estimated margin of error of the samples included in the projection. The forecast was based on the volatility in the polls.

Leaning so heavily on the polls themselves seems to be a bad idea, considering the problems that have occurred in the last three provincial elections. Instead, I will try to estimate the likely error of the polls based on how the polls have been wrong before, showing what an average over- and under-estimation has been for parties in similar situations in other elections (i.e., incumbent governments). That should provide a good indication of how much error we can expect in the polls, and I will also include a best guess as to whether an over- or under-estimation is more likely.

I'd also like to develop a turnout model that can be included in addition to the high/low and poll forecasts. At this stage, I'm favouring something simple: dropping the 18-34s from every poll and doubling the 55+. I will look into this more deeply, but I suspect it will provide better results in the majority of cases. Anything more complicated is probably not necessary (the simpler a model can be, the better - usually).

Almost every pollster that has written a post-mortem and with whom I've talked or corresponded, whether or not they were active in British Columbia, has identified the hit to the polling industry's reputation that the last few elections have inflicted as a major problem. Some are upset that polls using different methodologies are causing people to paint the entire industry with the same brush.

I suspect that because of these concerns, those pollsters who will be active in future campaigns will invest extra time and money into ensuring their polls are right. They need to rehabilitate their industry's reputation, and those that missed the call in Alberta and B.C. need to rehabilitate their own. The incentive of proving one's own methodology to be accurate will be even stronger, particularly for those that were not active in B.C. For that reason, I am optimistic that the next set of elections will have better polling. Perhaps naively so.

B.C. post-mortem, polling methodologies, and where to go from here

Note that this post was written before the final count that was concluded on May 29, 2013. The final count changed the results slightly, with the Liberals winning 49 seats and 44.1% of the vote and the New Democrats taking 34 seats and 39.7% of the vote. The riding which flipped over to the New Democrats was Coquitlam-Maillardville, which the projection had originally forecast for the NDP. That increased the accuracy to 82.4%, or 70 out of 85 ridings. The Electoral Track Record has been updated to reflect the final counts, but the post below has not been.

Now that the dust has settled a little and those in the polling industry (along with myself) have had some time to reflect on Tuesday's results in British Columbia, it is time to take a look at how the projection model performed. But I'd also like to discuss the methodological debate in Canadian polling, how this site has approached it, and the future of this site within the context of a plummeting faith in polling.

The model did about as well as it could considering how different the election's results were to the final polls of the campaign. The model is not capable of second-guessing the polls to the extent that it could have predicted an eight-point NDP lead turning into a five-point Liberal win.

The forecast ranges were included to try to estimate how badly the polls could do if another Alberta-like scenario played out, and aside from the NDP falling two points below the forecasted low they were able to capture all of the vote and seat results at the provincial level. They were not, however, able to capture the performance of the Liberals and New Democrats in metropolitan Vancouver and in the Interior/North, demonstrating just how unbelievably well the Liberals did in these two parts of the province. Their vote came out in huge numbers here (and/or the NDP's stayed home), and the Liberals won the election.

Of course, the forecast ranges are somewhat absurdly wide. But that is more of a reflection of how unpredictable elections have become in Canada. They are absurdly wide, and yet still needed.

The parties did about as well as expected on Vancouver Island, however. If turnout was one of the factors in explaining why the polls missed the call, the Liberal ground game did its work in the rest of the province, while Vancouver Island was left to the NDP.

In all, the seat projection made the right call in 69 of 85 ridings for an accuracy rating of 81.2%, while the potential winner was correctly identified (by way of the projection ranges) in 73 of 85 ridings, for a rating of 85.9%.  This shows how the election was really won in just 12 ridings, as the projection ranges (which did not consider a Liberal victory likely) only missed those 12.

Metropolitan Vancouver was where the election was primarily won. The projection gave the NDP between 45% and 51% of the vote and the Liberals between 36% and 41%. Instead, the Liberals took 46.1% of the vote in the region (as this site defines it) to only 40.4% to the NDP. The Liberals won 24 of the 40 ridings, instead of the 14-16 they were expected to win.

The Interior/North was also a major factor in the Liberals' victory. They were expected to win the region with between 38% to 45% of the vote, narrowly beating the NDP out at between 37% and 45%. This gave the Liberals between 12 and 22 seats and the NDP between 9 and 16. Instead, the Liberals won 24 seats with 48.2% of the vote, while the NDP won only 7 seats with 35.4% of the vote.

On Vancouver Island, the NDP won 11 seats, the Liberals two, and the Greens one. The projection did not give the Greens any seats, but expected 11 to 14 for the NDP and 0-3 for the Liberals. The NDP was expected to take between 44% and 53% of the vote, the Liberals between 27% and 35%, and the Greens between 10% and 17%. The NDP actually took 43.9% to 34.2% for the Liberals and 17.2% for the Greens. It would seem that some of the Conservative vote (they took 4%) went to the Liberals and some of the NDP vote went to the Greens, but overall the island played out mostly as forecast.

As usual, the seat projection model was not at fault. If the polls had been accurate, the model would have projected 49 seats for the B.C. Liberals and 36 for the B.C. New Democrats, mirroring the result closely. The ranges would have been 37 to 57 seats for the Liberals and 27 to 46 for the NDP, while up to one Green would have been projected and two independents.

The right call would have been made in 76 of 85 ridings, for an accuracy rating of 89.4%, while the potential winner would have been correctly identified in 81 of 85 ridings, for a rating of 95.3%. The challenge remains getting the vote totals closer to the mark. Frustratingly, that is the one thing I have the least control over.

How the projection model would have been wrong in a few individual ridings is interesting, and reflects just how important local campaigning can be. Three of the incorrect nine ridings (with the actual regional vote results) included Delta South, Vancouver-Point Grey, and Oak Bay-Gordon Head. The model would never have been able to boost Andrew Weaver's support enough to give him the win without some improper fiddling with it on my end. In Delta South, Vicki Huntingdon's support was stronger than would have been expected. And most significantly, Christy Clark's rejection in her own riding is all the more starkly shown. She did not lose it because the overall race was close - the overall swing should have kept the riding in her hands.

Polling methodology and what went wrong

All eyes have turned to how the pollsters are doing their work. Some of the pollsters are looking at their methods and trying to figure out what went wrong and what can be done to avoid these issues in the future. Others are crowing that this or that poll they did a week before the election turned out to be prescient, and it appears that some lessons will not be learned.

A hypothesis does seem to be forming as to what happened. I'd identify a few factors:

Turnout - Turnout was only about 52% in this election, and that can throw off a pollster's numbers to a large degree. However, turnout was also very low in the 2009 election and the polls did a decent job that time. Turnout is not a silver bullet, then, but the effect turnout had in 2009 may not have been the same as in 2013.

Motivation - According to Ipsos-Reid's exit poll (which I will return to in the future), very few British Columbians thought the Liberals would win a majority government (only about one-in-ten), while one-half thought the New Democrats would win. This might have depressed turnout even more, with some New Democrats not bothering to vote since they felt they would win, and some Liberals turning out in greater numbers to ensure their local MLA would get re-elected, even if the party itself would be booted out of government. Conceivably, though, Liberals not bothering to vote for a lost cause should have cancelled things out. And in most cases, people tend to vote in greater numbers for a perceived winner.

Election Day Shift - Yes, it is unbelievable that the polls were right all along and a dramatic change of heart occurred in the final hours. But Ipsos-Reid's poll showed that 9% of Liberal voters made-up their minds in the voting booth. If all of those voters had instead voted for a different party, the Liberals would have been reduced to about 40%. That would have been closer to most polls, but still much higher than even the margin of error would have considered possible. And, of course, some of those 9% might have just been wavering Liberals who did not make up their mind until the last minute, but had told pollsters they were still intending to vote Liberal. While certainly part of the equation, it cannot be all of it.

Bad polling - This is probably the main reason why the polls missed out on the call. The other three factors may have been worth a few points each, but there does seem to have been a problem in building a representative sample. Pollsters will need to figure out why that is.

One of the problems that has been identified most often (especially by those pollsters who use other methods) is that most of the polls used online panels. These have had success in the past, including the 2009 B.C. election, but perhaps online panels are less able to consistent give good results - particularly in provincial campaigns where the panel may be smaller. But this cannot be the only reason, as Angus-Reid's online polling in Manitoba - a province with a quarter of the population of British Columbia - was stellar in its 2011 provincial election.

Nevertheless, the track record of online firms has taken a hit. Telephone polls using live-callers still seem to have the most success. Reaching people by telephone - including mobile phones - probably remains the best way to do quality polling. It is also a good way to do expensive polling.

Is the extra accuracy worth the extra cost? That might not be the case when it comes to market research. Whether it is 36% or 44% of people who say they have trust in your company's brand is not vital information, as long as it is in the ballpark. Even at their worst, online polls have been in the ballpark (the Liberals and NDP were not polled to win the election in Alberta, and nor were the Greens or Conservatives ever pegged to have more than marginal support). But in an election, the quality of a poll, and not the cost, should be the deciding factor in whether or not to report it.

The chart below reveals some information that I have up to now kept to myself. Pollsters are rated in my weighting system by their track record. That track record extends back over 10 years, with more recent elections being more heavily weighted. The difference between one firm and the next is usually not very large, and some of the difference is due to the elections in which these firms have decided to take part. Those that stayed out of Alberta and B.C. are inevitably going to have better ratings than those who didn't. I have considered overhauling the rating system to take into account these sorts of considerations, but I have not yet done so. Because I haven't, I am reluctant to actually rank the polling firms publicly by name.

But I am willing to rank them by methodology. These are the 10 firms in Canada I consider to be major firms, and the method they have used in their most recent election campaign. They are polling firms that release national, regional, or provincial polls on a regular basis. The chart shows each firm's average error per party in any election in which they were active, going back ten years.

As you can immediately see, the polling firms that conduct their surveys using live-callers occupy the top three ranks. The online and IVR polling firms have had less success. The difference is not huge, however - on average, the third best firm misses the call by fewer than 0.5 percentage points per party than the seventh best.

However, it is clear that polls conducted over the telephone with live-callers have had a better track record. That does not mean that they will always have a better result: in the 2011 federal election, Angus-Reid's online panel had the lowest per-party error. But it does suggest that the online panels still have some work to do.

Where to go from here

There were moments yesterday when I contemplated the end of ThreeHundredEight. Why run a site about polling when polling in Canada is so horrid?

But the polling is not always horrid, and even when it seems to be on the bad side there are some indications of something else at play. Alberta is an obvious example, but maybe British Columbia's errors have some mitigating factors as well.

Even if that is not the case - and I am not convinced that it is - polls are not going away and I still believe that they are a useful tool. The electorate deserves to know what the collective wisdom of the people is on various issues, including on the question of who should govern them. But the electorate deserves good, reliable information. Bad information is much worse than none at all, but polls are not going to disappear.

Though I could never claim to be impartial on the question of whether polls should be paid any attention at all (if they are ignored, I would need to find a new line of work), I can continue to be an impartial observer, analyst, and (when need be) critic of the industry. In its own tiny little way, ThreeHundredEight can be part of the solution.

That means more of a focus on methodological and transparency issues, sweeping trends, uncertainties in the polling data, and wider questions about what the numbers mean, if anything at all. It means less focus on the horserace, more caution in reporting numbers, a forecasting model that emphasizes what we don't know, and more reserve in giving attention to questionable polls. And when a poll is questionable, drawing attention to the reasons why.

It might mean a drop in traffic and it will certainly require more work and effort on my end. And like all junkies, I might relapse. But I think it will be a worthwhile endeavour. I welcome your thoughts in the comments section.

Polling industry dealt major blow in B.C. election

Last night was a very bad one for Adrian Dix and the New Democrats, who expected victory as much as the pollsters did. And with good reason: a stabilizing, maybe even growing, lead over the B.C. Liberals with hours to go before the polls opened. Instead, British Columbians collectively woke up and changed their minds and swung about 13 points towards Christy Clark. Or, more likely, something disastrously wrong occurred in the polling industry.

I wrote about the implications for the four party leaders for The Huffington Post Canada, and took a look at why the polls went wrong for The Globe and Mail.

Why did they go wrong? I have no explanation this morning. In Alberta, there was the late swing. There was the novelty of the Wildrose Party. There was the relative lack of polling in the final days. There was the inexperience of the pollsters who were active. There was the immensely more well-oiled organization of the Progressive Conservatives.

In British Columbia, there was no indication of a late swing. If anything, there was a sign that Clark's momentum had reversed itself. The New Democrats were not an unknown quantity. There was polling being done as late as Monday. There was the experience of two pollsters with long and successful histories in British Columbia. There was the much-vaunted GOTV organization of the NDP. And yet all the polls said the New Democrats would win, and all the polls were wrong.

(Note: the chart below includes the average standard deviation between the polls from each pollster, meant as an attempt to determine whose numbers were fluctuating the most. It seems like a moot point now.)

Forum Research ended up doing the best, but they should not gloat. As in Alberta, they were the best of a bunch of bad polls. They were in the field six days before the election, when the Liberals appeared to be at their peak in polls by other firms, and in all likelihood were just lucky not to release any new numbers. And it was odd that they didn't, as Forum has released 11th hour polling in Quebec, Alberta, and even Labrador.

My vote projections did second-best, mostly because I had a mechanism for diluting the support of the Greens and Conservatives. On the Liberals and NDP, I was as wrong as anyone else.

The forecasted ranges captured every vote and seat result with the exception of the NDP. Those ranges are designed to account for an Alberta-level event, but even so they were unable to predict that the New Democrats would under-perform in the popular vote to such a great degree. The ranges, implying that the polls should always be considered potentially spectacularly wrong, were apparently a good idea, but if ranges of this size need to be included in every election the usefulness of the forecasting model is virtually zero. In even a modestly close election, they will always span almost the entire spectrum since most ridings come into play at that point.

I have not had the time to input the actual vote results into the seat projection model yet, as I need to calculate the regional vote totals. I will do so as soon as possible. I suspect that the projected results will end up being very close to the actual results, as they have been in almost all the 10 elections I have worked on in the past. I will write a fuller post-mortem in the coming days.

There is no question that seat projection models like mine work. They are an effective way to translate poll results into seats. This is not voodoo magic, it is a rather simple endeavour. The challenge is being the least possible amount of wrong, which is the best that forecasters can hope for. But the models are only as good as the available information.

I have to admit that my confidence in the quality of that information - polling - has been profoundly shaken. Alberta was an aberration, and there was some good reason as to why it occurred (which I now have doubts about). Quebec was only a minor flub, which can be attributed in part to superior Liberal organization (or can it?). But this is a complete disaster. There is no reason why this should have happened, which leads me to believe that the reason it happened is because the pollsters did a bad job.

It might not be their fault exactly. Perhaps it is no longer possible to consistently and repeatedly build a sample that is reflective of the population. Can online panels be reliably effective when they aren't national? Work will have to be done to determine why this is happening and how it can be avoided. I have no doubt that the pollsters will eventually tackle the new challenges that they face. The question is how long it will take and whether it can be done in a country like Canada.

It puts into question the validity of the work I do. I write about polls every day for this site, for The Globe and Mail, for The Huffington Post Canada, and for The Hill Times. I give radio and television interviews about them. It is my full-time job. I've always approached it as a professional and have tried to provide insightful analysis of polling, separately from my role as a forecaster. No one in Canada who doesn't work for a polling firm writes about polls as much as I do.

How can I credibly continue to do so when I myself doubt that the results are reliable? While I was shocked when I saw the results last night, a part of me was not surprised that I was shocked and that they got it wrong all over again. If I go into every election assuming that disaster is more likely than triumph, what is the point?

This site was meant to be a way to cut through the confusion in polling and give a good idea of what, as a whole, the polls are saying. The site can still do that, but if what the polls are saying is not reflective of reality, what use is it?

My projection was wrong because the polls were wrong. Again. I am sorry that it was so. I can blame the pollsters for providing me with unreliable information, but I am nevertheless responsible for what is posted here, for the defense of polling I have mounted for the last few years, and for whatever confidence I expressed when analyzing the numbers in an attempt to inform readers about the state of the race in British Columbia and elsewhere. I apologize for that. Where do we go from here?

Final projection: Dix's B.C. NDP heavily favoured to win

Election night update: The results will fall within the high and low forecasted outcomes, but they were considered to be an unlikely event. It seems, instead, that with the polling we have in Canada we can expect these sorts of surprises more often. It is very disappointing.

The B.C. New Democrats under Adrian Dix should win tonight's election in British Columbia, pushing Christy Clark's B.C. Liberal Party to the opposition benches and ending their 12-year tenure in government.

ThreeHundredEight.com's final projection for the B.C. election has the NDP winning a majority government with the Liberals forming the Official Opposition. They should also be joined on the opposite side of the legislature by at least one independent MLA.

As recently as yesterday, based on the polls that had been in the field up to May 10, there was some doubt as to what the likely outcome of the election would be. The B.C. Liberals appeared to be closing the gap, and there was enough volatility to believe that the last weekend of the campaign could prove decisive. But the polls released yesterday, two of which were actually in the field yesterday, show the parties' support to have stabilized, giving Dix's NDP a comfortable lead.

The likely outcome

The projection gives the New Democrats between 44.1% and 47.9% of the vote, with 46% considered the most likely outcome. They should win between 44 and 55 seats, while 49 is considered most likely. That puts the NDP safely in majority territory. Unless the polls are glaringly inaccurate, there is every indication that Dix will be the next premier of British Columbia.

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The Liberals are slated to take between 35.8% and 39.6% of the vote, or 37.7% more precisely. That should give them between 26 and 41 seats, while 35 is considered the most likely outcome. Clark's Liberals should then be able to form a robust opposition, and give the party some foundation upon which to rebuild. 

The B.C. Greens under Jane Sterk are projected to finish third with 7.8% of the vote, or between 6.8% and 8.8%. They are not expected to win a seat, though they should put up some very strong numbers in the Greater Victoria region. There is an outside chance for an upset - in particular the riding of Oak Bay-Gordon Head should be watched. The projection model is probably unable to fully reflect the potential strength of Andrew Weaver's campaign, due to the low level of support the party received in the riding in the 2009 election.

John Cummins's B.C. Conservatives are projected to finish fourth with 5.2% of the vote, or between 4.3% and 6.1%. They are also not considered to be in the running to win a seat.

Another 3.2% of British Columbians (or between 1.6% and 4.8%) are expected to vote for independent candidates and smaller parties. As many as four independents could be elected, but the projection model considers the re-election of one independent to be the most likely outcome.

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With only a matter hours between the time the final polls of the campaign were in the field and the beginning of voting in British Columbia, the Liberals are estimated to have only a 1.7% chance of making up the difference or proving the polls wrong. The New Democrats have a 98.3% chance of ending up with more votes tonight than the Liberals.

They also have an 83.3% chance of winning more seats, giving the Liberals a 16.7% chance of proving the polls and the projection ranges wrong enough to emerge as the victors. Those chances take into account the possibility that the Liberals could win more seats with fewer votes than the NDP, but the odds are not very high. Nevertheless, recent elections have rewarded an abundance of caution.

Being prepared for the unexpected

The forecasting model is designed to consider the possibility of an Alberta-level event, both in terms of the potential inaccuracies in the polls and a late swing in voting intentions. But there is little indication that something like Alberta is in the works, whereas my final projection for that election was soaked in uncertainty. I am far more confident in this final projection than I was with Alberta's, but the forecasting model does consider it possible for the Liberals to eke out a victory. With the volatility we have seen in the regional-level polling, the Liberals could win as many as 60 seats or be reduced to as few as five. The NDP could win as many as 78 or as few as 23. These are extremely unlikely outcomes. The polls would need to be disastrously wrong to cause such a surprise.

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The forecast ranges for the Greens and Conservatives are perhaps a little more realistic. Polling for these small parties can be more difficult, particularly when it comes to trying to capture individually strong local campaigns. The Greens have been polling surprisingly well in the Interior and North despite an incomplete slate, and the forecasting model thus gives them the potential to pull off an upset there. More likely, however, is that the polls and the seat projection model could be unable to accurately record what is going on in some of the ridings in the Victoria region. For these reasons, the forecasting model considers as many as eight seats a possibility for the Greens, though anything about two should be considered very implausible.

For the Conservatives, pulling off a surprise somewhere in the Interior should not be ruled out. However, the numbers have not been heading in the right direction for them.

But for all these forecasts, we're merely looking at the plausible rather than the probable. The tighter projection ranges are the most likely outcomes, especially considering the stability of the final polls of the campaign as well as the track records of the firms who were in the field yesterday (both Angus-Reid and Ipsos-Reid have long and successful histories in British Columbia).

Regional breakdowns

The New Democrats are very well positioned in the southwestern corner of the province, with a strong lead in metropolitan Vancouver and a very wide one on Vancouver Island.

In and around Vancouver, the New Democrats are projected to take between 45% and 50.6% of the vote, giving them 24 or 25 seats. The Liberals should take between 35.8% and 41.2% support and between 14 and 16 seats. The Greens are expected to capture between 5.1% and 7.9% support, while the Conservatives are strongly considered likely to finish fourth with between 3% and 5.2% of the vote. One independent is expected to be elected as well.

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On Vancouver Island, the New Democrats should take between 43.9% and 52.9% of the vote and win between 11 and 14 seats. The Liberals are projected at between 27% and 35.2% of the vote and as many as three seats. The Greens should finish third with between 10.4% and 16.6% of the vote, while the Conservatives should take between 3.7% and 7.9%. Though the Greens are not projected to win any seats, the forecast puts them in the running for as many as three.

In the B.C. Interior and North, the race is far more competitive. Either the NDP or Liberals could win the most support, with the slight edge being given to the Liberals. They should take between 37.8% and 45% of the vote, while the NDP stands at between 37.3% and 44.5% support. That gives the Liberals between 12 and 22 seats and the NDP between nine and 16. The Conservatives or Greens will finish third, with the Conservatives favoured at between 5.2% and 9% support. The Greens should captured between 4.5% and 8.1% of the vote. As many as three independents could be elected in the region, with between 2.2% and 6.5% support.

What the polls have shown

There is no doubt that the Liberals were able to close the gap due to an energetic campaign and a decent debate performance by Clark, aided by a very safe NDP campaign that allowed the Liberals to dominate the agenda. But after taking an initial hit, the NDP vote stabilized and the Liberals were unable to make enough ground to turn things around in the final weeks.

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The projection adjusts the polls slightly in order to take into account the over-estimation of support that polls have traditionally been guilty of in the case of Green parties throughout Canada, and more generally of small parties without a seat in the legislature (in this case, the Conservatives). The model also estimates the support of independents and other parties independently of the polls. 

Without these adjustments, the numbers change slightly. The weighted, unadjusted poll average would then give the NDP 44.2% of the vote to 36.2% for the Liberals, 9.8% for the Greens, 6.9% for the Conservatives, and 2.9% for the others. Conservative support in the Interior and North would sit at 9.2%, while the Greens would be at 16.6% on Vancouver Island. Without these adjustments, the Greens and Conservatives might be considered more likely to win a seat. But there would be no more consequential differences in the projected winner overall.

How the leaders have fared

Campaigns clearly matter. Prior to the campaign, Adrian Dix had a double-digit lead over Christy Clark on the question of who would make the best premier. The latest polls suggest that the gap has closed to only three points. The last three surveys have averaged 30.7% for Dix on this question, with Clark at 27.7%. The campaign had a significant effect on Clark's ratings on this score, and for a brief moment she was even polling better than the NDP leader.

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Clark's approval rating also improved during the course of the race, but still averaged only 34.7% at the campaign's end. Dix's approval rating was 41.7%, putting him in a tie with Jane Sterk. Her approval soared during the campaign, but she had already surpassed Clark by the end of March. Cummins's approval rating held more or less steady, and finished at 21%.

In terms of their chances of election, only Adrian Dix is favoured to be in the legislature after the dust settles. Too much should not be made of the individual riding projections (the overall numbers are more important), but probability calculations make their forecasts more interesting.

Riding projections

Dix is a lock to win Vancouver-Kingsway, with the model estimating his re-election odds to be 94%. Clark's re-election chances are not nearly as good, however. The NDP is actually favoured to win her riding, with an estimated 62% chance of winning, but that is not much better than a coin flip. Sterk is expected to put up some strong numbers in Victoria-Beacon Hill, but the NDP's Carole James is given an 87% chance of being re-elected. And the Liberals are given a 62% chance of holding on to Langley, where Cummins is running. The NDP is considered more likely to win it than Cummins, though the model is almost certainly under-estimating the party leader's drawing power.

The importance of a campaign

Considering just how long the New Democrats under Adrian Dix have been leading in the polls in British Columbia, and the dozen years the Liberals have been in power, an NDP victory should not come as too much of a surprise. At the campaign's outset, the New Democrats were leading by 18 points. That Clark's Liberals were able to reduce that lead to only eight points and put themselves in a position where the foregone conclusion became a potentially historic comeback is a testament to the importance of an election campaign. 

In the end, however, the result is what counts. The New Democrats have been favoured to win this election for many months. That they will probably win it with a smaller margin than they had enjoyed for the 12 months or so prior to the campaign's start does not invalidate those expectations. Enough British Columbians changed their minds during the last four weeks to change the tone of the race, but the numbers do not lie. It was always going to take a pitch-perfect campaign, and a lot of luck, for Clark's Liberals to overcome the huge hill that had formed in front of them. They put up a strong fight, but it may have been too much.

The polls were getting a little uncertain of themselves in the last week of the campaign, but they are now clear and consistent. Reasons for doubt existed in Alberta, and plausible excuses were made for that debacle. There will be no such excuse this time. Unless the polling industry is on the verge of an even more humiliating and unlikely collapse, Adrian Dix will become the next Premier of British Columbia.

Final 2013 British Columbia projection

The following are ThreeHundredEight.com's final projections and forecasts for the 2013 provincial election in British Columbia, scheduled for May 14, 2013. These numbers were last updated on May 14, 2013, and reflect the best estimates as of May 13, 2013, the last day of polls included in the model. You can click on all of the charts below to magnify them.

The numbers within the gray boxes reflect the forecasts for the May 14, 2013 election, while the numbers within the white box reflects the likely outcomes of an election held as of the last day of polling.

A detailed explanation of the vote and seat projection models and how the probability forecasts are calculated can be here.

The projections are subject to the margin of error of the polls included in the model, as well as the inherent inability for the projection model to make perfect estimations of real-world dynamics. The projection ranges are a reflection of the degree of uncertainty intrinsic in polling, while the ranges in the forecast are a reflection of the plausible amount of change in support that can be expected between now and the election, as well as the error that polls have made in the past. The probabilities are based on the past performances of the projection model and of how polls have differed from election results in the past, with consideration being made for the amount of time between the polls being conducted and the election being held.

The following chart lists the polls currently included in the projection model, as well as the weight each poll carries.

The following is a list of the current projections for all 85 of British Columbia's ridings. These are the best estimates of likely outcomes if an election were held on the last day of polling. The high and low results are  the estimates of likely floors and ceilings, based on the vote projection ranges. The probabilities listed beside each riding is the likelihood that, if an election were held on the last day of polling, the winning party identified by the model would actually win. It does not assign any probability to a particular trailing party winning the riding - if a projection gives the leading party a 75% chance of winning, there is a 25% chance that any of the other parties could win.

These riding projections are not polls and are not necessarily an accurate reflection of current voting intentions in each riding. It may be necessary to right-click and open the chart in a new window in order to be able to read it.

The following chart tracks the projection, projection ranges, and forecast ranges over time. The chart includes a legend on how to read it.

The next chart tracks the regional vote projections, without also tracking projected ranges or forecasts. It is best used a means of looking at voter trends as suggested by the polls in each region as the election approaches.

This chart tracks the probabilities assigned to one party winning the popular vote on May 14, 2013 and one party winning the election as of the projection date.

This chart shows the unadjusted poll averages, weighting only for date, sample size, and track record of polling firm. Unlike the site's projection, these averages do not penalize the Greens and Conservatives or estimate the support for independents and other parties.

This next chart tracks the polls that have been released since the beginning of April, with each dot representing the result of a poll that was in the field on that day.

This last chart is tracks a rolling three-poll average of approval ratings of the four leaders and scores on the question of who is the best choice to be Premier. The leaders are: Christy Clark (Liberals), Adrian Dix (NDP), John Cummins (Conservatives), and Jane Sterk (Greens.

ThreeHundredEight.com defines British Columbia's three regions as follows:

Vancouver Island (14): Alberni-Pacific Rim, Comox Valley, Cowichan Valley, Esquimalt-Royal Roads, Juan de Fuca, Nanaimo, Nanaimo-North Cowichan, North Island, Oak Bay-Gordon Head, Parksville-Qualicum, Saanich North and the Island, Saanich South, Victoria-Beacon Hill, Victoria-Swan Lake

Metro Vancouver (40): Burnaby-Deer Lake, Burnaby-Edmonds, Burnaby-Lougheed, Burnaby North, Coquitlam-Burke Mountain, Coquitlam-Maillardville, Delta North, Delta South, Fort Langley-Aldergrove, Langley, Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows, New Westminster, North Vancouver-Lonsdale, North Vancouver-Seymour, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody-Coquitlam, Richmond Centre, Richmond East, Richmond-Steveston, Surrey-Cloverdale, Surrey-Fleetwood, Surrey-Green Timbers, Surrey-Newton, Surrey-Panorama, Surrey-Tynehead, Surrey-Whalley, Surrey-White Rock, Vancouver-Fairview, Vancouver-False Creek, Vancouver-Fraserview, Vancouver-Hastings, Vancouver-Kensington, Vancouver-Kingsway, Vancouver-Langara, Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, Vancouver-Point Grey, Vancouver-Quilchena, Vancouver-West End, West Vancouver-Capilano, West Vancouver-Sea to Sky

B.C. Interior and North (31): Abbotsford-Mission, Abbotsford South, Abbotsford West, Boundary-Similkameen, Cariboo-Chicotin, Cariboo North, Chilliwack, Chilliwack-Hope, Columbia River-Revelstoke, Fraser-Nicola, Kamloops-North Thompson, Kamloops-South Thompson, Kelowna-Lake Country, Kelowna-Mission, Kootenay East, Kootenay West, Maple Ridge-Mission, Nechako Lakes, Nelson-Creston, North Coast, Peace River South, Peace River North, Penticton, Powell River-Sunshine Coast, Prince George-Mackenzie, Prince George-Valemount, Shuswap, Skeena, Stikine, Vernon-Monashee, Westside-Kelowna

Gap continues to close, but time running out in B.C.

The newest projection for Tuesday's B.C. election shows the gap between the B.C. New Democrats and B.C. Liberals narrowing further, to 6.3 points. And for the first time, the high seat projection range for the Liberals puts them just over the bar of a majority government (43 seats). But with only a few days remaining, Christy Clark is still just a 10-to-1 shot of being re-elected.

The New Democrats are projected to take 43% of the vote based on current polling, or between 40.5% and 45.5%. The Liberals have increased to 36.8% (or between 34.4% and 39.2%), but there is still enough volatility in the polls to give the NDP as little as 37% by election day or as much as 49%. Suffice to say, at those extremes the Liberals are either decimated or re-elected. But they are extremes.

These numbers give the New Democrats 52 seats to 32 for the Liberals, but the projected high and low ranges now overlap: 40-65 for the NDP and 16-43 for the Liberals. Those are rather wide as the amount of polling data has thinned out (it should beef up again between now and Monday night) and the race is rather close in the Interior and North. But that 43 is the highest the Liberals have been in the projection ranges. The forecast ranges have tightened up a little as some older polls have dropped out of consideration, but they nevertheless still envision anything from an NDP landslide to a Liberal majority. We shall see if they will tighten up further, but with the changes that have occurred in the last two weeks it is perhaps wise to keep our expectations to a minimum.

However, the NDP is still the heavy favourite. A 20-seat edge in the projection will be right 91.7% of the time, so the odds that Clark's Liberals will prove the polls (and thus my projection) wrong are not very high. The odds that they can overcome the 6.3-point margin in six days (four remain before the vote, but the last bit of polling was out of the field on E-6) are slightly larger, at 9.5%, but we're still talking about an exceptional case. The NDP remains the easy favourite to win, but we will have to see what Angus-Reid and Ipsos-Reid have to say in the coming hours and days.

I have some mixed feelings about the two polls that were added to the projection, as they are both from firms dipping their toes into the B.C. campaign for the first time (publicly, at least).

We have already heard from Oraclepoll as they were commissioned to do riding surveys for local newspapers in Kamloops and Prince George. But they haven't put out a province-wide survey since November 2011.

They show a closer race than everyone but Forum has indicated, but we should consider that Oraclepoll is the only firm using live-callers to have put out a provincial poll out in this campaign. Perhaps that methodological difference means something.

If we look at their last poll from 2011, we see that it pegged the NDP at 44%, the Liberals at 25%, and the Greens at 16%. By comparison, the polls taken in the two months before and after that Oraclepoll averaged 41% for the NDP, 30% for the Liberals, and 10% for the Greens. If anything, Oracelpoll was showing lower numbers for the Liberals and higher ones for the Greens than other surveys at the time. That does not give us much reason to suggest that Oraclepoll's methodology is conditioned to over-estimate Liberal support, and thus show a narrower gap, but their methods may have changed in the last two years.

The amount of available information about this poll is disappointing, as we don't even have regional breakdowns. But their provincial results aren't out of step with other surveys to any significant degree.

The survey from Hill and Knowlton came out of the woodwork even more. The Victoria Times-Colonist commissioned the poll from Oraclepoll, but this one from H&K was put out in a press release. It was done with H&K's online panel, and did not show any odd results. Aside from a closer race in (small sample) Vancouver Island, their regional breakdowns fell well within the norm.

Though I don't consider Hill and Knowlton to be a polling firm (they do lobbying and public relations), it should come as no surprise that this important company would have its own public opinion research wing to help it advise clients. And considering they are putting their reputation at stake to some degree by releasing these numbers, it seems safe to conclude that they are reasonably confident in them. They have no particular reason not to be.

But as both Hill and Knowlton and Oraclepoll are publishing for the first time in this campaign, it is impossible to really say what these numbers represent in terms of a trend. Is the gap narrowing? Or if these two firms had been in the field earlier in the campaign, would they have shown a similar gap? We don't know, but other polls have been showing the same sort of trends. It should make Tuesday night interesting.

Ipsos poll gives Dix more breathing room

A poll by Ipsos-Reid for the provincial election in British Columbia had some comparatively good news for Adrian Dix and the B.C. New Democrats, as it put his party 10 points up on the B.C. Liberals - a more comfortable margin than the three other polls that have been released since last week's debate. As a result, Dix has a more comfortable lead over the Liberals in the projection, and the likely ranges now put him entirely in majority territory once again.

The New Democrats are now projected to have between 42.1% and 46.1% of the vote, giving them between 43 and 56 seats. More precisely, they are currently projected to take 44.1% of the vote and 48 seats. The Liberals are between 34.1% and 37.9% and between 26 and 42 seats, or 36% and 36 seats more specifically. These ranges are also positive for Dix: his party leads in fewer close ridings than those in which it trails.

The Greens and Conservatives have dropped a little to 9.6% and 7.1%, respectively.

The odds that the NDP would win the most seats if an election were held today have improved to 78.6%, while he has a 94% chance of winning the popular vote on May 14. The large difference between the two are primarily due to two things: it is possible to win the most seats and lose the popular vote, and the probabilities are calculated differently. The probability of the NDP winning the popular vote is based on how the polls have moved, and have been wrong, in the past. The probability of the NDP winning the most seats is based on how the seat projection model has performed in other elections. It would only need to get six seats wrong (an accuracy rating of 93%) to put the two parties in a tie.

Ipsos-Reid's poll suggests that the gap between the two parties has closed, but sets off a few fewer alarm bells than the polls from Forum, Insights West, and Angus-Reid. But a narrowing gap was expected.

The chart below updates an article I wrote for The Globe and Mail before the B.C. campaign had kicked off. It originally showed that the margin the NDP had over the Liberals was greater than the one the Liberals had in the last two elections, and that it was holding relatively steady. But as you can see, the margin has closed very quickly and in a more dramatic fashion than in either 2005 or 2009.

The lead is now less than the one the Liberals had at this stage of the 2009 election, but larger than the margin of the 2005 election. But you can also see that the trends are not always exactly linear. In both 2005 and 2009 the Liberals had a bit of an uptick before the gap closed again.

And it needs to be noted that the last, steep closing of the gap in 2001, 2005, and 2009 were primarily due to errors and/or late movement between the last polls of the campaign and election day. And in every case, those errors and late swings were to the advantage of the B.C. New Democrats. We will find out whether this phenomenon is exclusive to the B.C. Liberal Party or just the party that is leading the polls next week.

Ipsos-Reid was last in the field Apr. 11-14, and since then the NDP dropped three points to 45% while the Liberals increased by six points to 35%.

The Greens were up one point to 10% and the Conservatives were down four points to 7%.

That gain by the Liberals is significant, but Ipsos is also judging Conservative support to be lower than in other polls - and probably more realistically.

Unlike the Angus-Reid survey, Ipsos-Reid finds the gender gap to still be in place: the two parties were tied among men while the NDP had a 20-point advantage among women (!). Also of note is that, according to the poll, roughly 1-in-4 supporters of the Green and Conservatives parties say they could change their mind by election day. But unless Christy Clark starts picking in the pockets of the NDP, they would need about 60% of Green and Conservative supporters to change their mind and vote Liberal in order for her to close the gap entirely.

Regionally, Ipsos-Reid shows the same sort of numbers that the other firms recorded in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island. It appears that on the island the Greens have stopped making gains. But in the Interior and north, Ipsos-Reid still gives the NDP the edge. Angus-Reid, Insights West, and Forum all gave the nod instead to the Liberals. Much of the election will be decided here.

The next round of polls could be very revealing. When you look at the chart showing how the gap has closed in other elections, you have to believe that, if the polls continue to show gains for the Liberals, Clark would have a very good chance of pulling off a big upset next week (and if she does, we'll never hear the end of the "polls having been wrong", rather than the reality of minds having changed over the course of a campaign). But if the polls instead show little change in the numbers, one might conclude that Dix will be able to hold on and win. There isn't much time left for another lurch in the polls.

B.C. Liberals narrow gap considerably

Perhaps the debate was better for Christy Clark than most people thought, or perhaps the campaign is finally catching up to Adrian Dix. But the B.C. Liberals have made good gains in the polls and have now narrowed the gap between themselves and the B.C. New Democrats to single-digits.

Some context is needed, however. Trailing by seven points in the polls with less than two weeks to go before the vote is not a position most incumbent governments would want to be in. The forecast considers the odds that the Liberals will be able to close the gap completely by May 14 to be only 7.3%. In fewer than one out of every 10 cases has a party been able to close such a gap in such a short period of time. But those are better than the 50-to-1 odds Clark had only a few weeks ago.

Nevertheless, we are definitely in a new part of the campaign. The New Democrats are still safely ahead of the Liberals but the gap is not nearly as comfortable as it was before. They are now projected to have 43% support, down 3.8 points from the last projection that included polling data up to Apr. 26. The Liberals are up 2.6 points to 35.8%, while the Greens are up 1.4 points to 10.1%. The Conservatives have held steady with 7.8% support.

The ranges have tightened up somewhat due to three new polls being added to the model, and the projected vote ranges do not overlap. But the seat ranges do: the New Democrats are projected to win between 38 and 53 seats, while the Liberals are projected to win between 28 and 46 seats. For the first time in the projection model, the upper range for the Liberals is actually enough to win the election.

More precisely, the New Democrats are projected to win 46 seats and the Liberals 38, a rather close result. With a gap of only eight seats between the two, the projection model now gives the New Democrats a 73.8% chance of winning the most seats if an election were held today, a big change from the 95.2% chance of Apr. 26. Considering the potential for further swings and errors in both the projection model and polls, eight seats is not a very good cushion.

One big advantage the New Democrats have is that they are holding relatively steady in the Vancouver region, where almost half of the province's seats are located. They only dropped 1.5 points there, and are still projected to win 25 seats. Their lead on Vancouver Island has been whittled down, though, with a drop of 7.1 points to 45.8%. The Liberals jumped 7.6 points to 30.9% (the Greens were mostly unchanged), and could now win two seats on the island.

The most important change occurred in the Interior and North. The New Democrats plummeted 8.5 points to 35%, pushing them behind the Liberals. They are up 5.3 points to 41.1%, giving them the lead for the first time in the region since the projection model was launched in November. Accordingly, they are projected to win 22 seats in the area, with only nine going to the New Democrats. The NDP will need to make up ground here.

But the polls are certainly under-estimating the New Democrats and the Liberals. The unadjusted average gives the NDP 40.7% and the Liberals 33.8%, with 12.5% going to the Greens and 10.1% to the Conservatives. But without a full slate (not to mention their disadvantage in money and organisation), it is virtually impossible that the Greens and Conservatives will take that much of the vote. The model assumes that the over-estimation will go the NDP and Liberals proportionately, but if it doesn't the end result could be at the higher or lower ends of the projection ranges.

The forecasts are currently unusable. The polls have moved around so much in the last 12 days that the model considers anything possible. If the polls continue to swing to the degree that they have in the last two weeks, the Liberals could easily be re-elected or catastrophically defeated. The uncertainty and volatility that the last few days have instilled in the model make the result of May 14 impossible to predict with a good degree of confidence. All that can be said is that, with what the polls are currently showing, the New Democrats are in a far superior position than the Liberals and should still be heavily favoured to win.

The poll by Forum Research for The National Post that was released yesterday morning caused the biggest splash, as it put the gap between the New Democrats and Liberals at only four points. But the polls that were subsequently released by Insights West and Angus-Reid show that Forum was not completely out of whack.

Looking at the three polls together, you can see that the differences are marginal.

Forum has not polled in British Columbia since August 2012, so the trends that could be derived from their survey are slim to none. They show a close race in Vancouver (42% to 36% for the NDP) and on Vancouver Island (39% to 33%), while the Liberals were ahead in the Interior and North (37% to 29%).

The survey put the Liberals ahead among those aged 55 and older, while the NDP held a one-point advantage among men and a seven-point edge among women.

A potential problem with the poll, however, is that 48% of people polled who said they voted (or could remember who they voted for) in 2009 cast a ballot for the Liberals, while only 30% did so for the NDP (the 8% result for the Greens was good, the 8% for the Conservatives was not). The actual margin in 2009 was 46% to 42%. The poll under-sampled New Democrats, then, but whether or not Forum weighted for this factor is a mystery. It is probably the reason that Forum has the NDP lower than the other two polls.

Insights West released their poll to News 1130, and found a more significant eight-point gap between the NDP and Liberals. They were last in the field Mar. 26-31, and since then the NDP fell four points and the Liberals gained five. Insights West also showed a closer race in Vancouver (41% to 35%) and a Liberal advantage in the Interior/North (33% to 30%), but not nearly the close race that Forum had found on Vancouver Island (43% to 28%). It does seem, however, that the Liberals are no longer in danger of placing third on the island. Green support was very consistent across these three polls, at between 19% and 21% on Vancouver Island.

Insights West included some numbers on likelihood of voting, finding that the New Democrats had the most certain respondents (97%), while Liberals (93%), Greens (91%), and Conservatives (89%) were somewhat less convinced. If those people who were not certain do not vote, Insight West's eight-point gap turns into a nine-point margin in favour of the NDP.

Angus-Reid's poll for The Globe and Mail and CTV News found similar movement, though their last survey was more recent (Apr. 24-25). They put the NDP down four points to 41% and the Liberals up three points to 34%. Those are probably not statistically significant changes in support, but the trend is in favour of the Liberals over the last few surveys.

Again, Angus-Reid found a closer race in Vancouver (45% to 35%) and a Liberal advantage in the Interior/North (estimated to be 43% to 33%). And like Insights West, a wide gap on Vancouver Island (44% to 28%).

Interestingly, Angus-Reid found that the gender gap had disappeared with the NDP having a seven-point lead among men and an eight-point lead among women. Like Forum (but unlike Insights West), they showed the Liberals doing much better than before among older voters. The demographics are not so bad for the Liberals anymore.

It is undeniable, then, that the race has been tightening up. But it was always supposed to - at least according to the politicians and the pundits (including yours truly). However, Clark is still at a personal disadvantage compared to Dix.

Her approval ratings in the Forum and Angus-Reid polls were almost identical: 34% approval, 56% to 57% disapproval. That is better than some of the numbers Clark had put up in the past, but they are still very bad. She really needs to be at 40% or more approval to be able to win. Because of her personal unpopularity, she keeps the potential for Liberal gains down.

Dix's numbers are not stellar either (37% approval to 44% disapproval for Forum, 41% approval to 47% disapproval for Angus-Reid), but they remain better. And 45% of respondents to Angus-Reid's poll still say their opinion of Clark has worsened, a much higher proportion than those who say their opinion of Dix has worsened. Of note, however, is that Clark now leads Dix on the question of who is best able to handle the economy, something that has not occurred for a very long time. But Dix still leads on other important issues like health care and education, but the economy remains the top campaign issue.

So, it is a race. Clark has gained on Dix but she still trails by a significant margin. It could be that she has momentum and will continue to gain, or it could be that she is peaking now and will end up with the moral victory of having salvaged her party from a mauling. We should have a better idea of which is closer to the truth in a week's time.