December 2013 federal polling "averages"

The quotation marks in the title of this post is no accident. There was only one publicly released national poll during the month of December, making it impossible to call the month's calculations an average. For that reason, I am not going to bother with a post detailing the month in polling, since I can instead just point you to the poll report from EKOS Research.

There was a federal Quebec poll conducted in December by CROP as well, which does make that province's estimation an average (33% LPC, 27% NDP, 22% BQ, 12% CPC). But it is still too little to spend any time on. So this post and the graph below has been uploaded to the site merely in order for future generations to know what happened in December 2013.

The EKOS poll does make the month look rather anomalous in some parts of the country. For example, it sinks the Conservatives to just 26% nationwide, their lowest on record, and shows big upticks in Green Party support in most regions. But apart from those exceptions, EKOS's numbers were not too unusual and do not make the line graph appear extraordinarily unwieldy. Hopefully things will fall in line in January.

Why the dearth of polls in December? You might suspect the holidays to be the culprit, and it is true that polling firms usually step out of the field in the last weeks of December. But there had been four national polls in December 2012, five in December 2011, seven in December 2010 (albeit in the context of a minority government), and four in December 2009. So, December 2013 was unusual.

There might be an element of poll fatigue at play, especially now that we are at the mid-point of the Conservative mandate and 2013 was a rough year for polls. Accordingly, I also suspect that the polling miss in Brandon-Souris, and the very negative press that resulted, may have encouraged a few pollsters to step outside for awhile. We saw a little bit of the same thing happen shortly after the election in British Columbia. That experience was so traumatic that it also apparently prompted one firm, Angus-Reid, to drop out of the political game entirely. We haven't heard from them with a poll on voting intentions anywhere since the B.C. election.

Over the last few years, January has been about as quiet as December so we could expect more silence. But because of the lack of polls released last month, I imagine that more than a few pollsters will come out with some new numbers soon. We haven't heard from some of the regulars since October. There are more than a few questions I'd like answered. Any consequences from the resignation of Daniel Paillé? Have any of the year-end interviews had an appreciable effect? Hopefully, we'll have some answers soon.

Manitoba PCs hold widening lead

Released between Christmas and New Year's, the latest polling numbers out of Manitoba may have been over-looked. The New Democrats should hope they were, because they were horrible. Probe Research shows Brian Pallister's Progressive Conservatives holding a gaping 22-point lead over the governing NDP. No party has won an election by such a margin in over 60 years.

Probe was last in the field for the Winnipeg Free Press in September, and since that poll they have recorded a five-point increase for the Tories. They now lead with 48%, while the New Democrats have dropped three points to 26%. The Liberals held steady at 20%, while 6% of respondents would vote for another party (mostly the Greens).

Of note is the large number of undecideds: 22%. That is a nine-point increase over the last two polls from Probe. Because of that, the shifts in support since September for any of the parties among decided voters do not seem statistically significant, though the increase in undecideds certainly is.

These numbers are remarkable since they represent the best and worst results for the PCs and NDP, respectively, in many years. In the space of 12 months, the NDP has shed 13 points of support. The Liberals have benefited, picking up nine points. The PCs have gained six.

It has put them in a strong position. They Tories led by 22 points among men and 20 points among women, while they were ahead in all age groups, education levels, and income brackets.

The party is also in front in Winnipeg, with 41% to 29% for the NDP (down seven points since September). The Liberals ran a strong third in the capital with 23%. The PCs were in front in every part of Winnipeg except the downtown core, where the NDP remains in front.

In the rest of the province, the Tories led with 58% to 21% for the NDP and 15% for the Liberals.

With these levels of support, the Progressive Conservatives would win a landslide with 42 seats to just nine for the NDP and six for the Liberals.

Almost all of the NDP and Liberal seats would come in the capital, while the Tories would sweep all of southern, rural Manitoba.

These are striking numbers, particularly since elections in Manitoba tend to be close affairs. As mentioned at the outset, no party has won an election by such a large margin as 22 points since 1953, so it follows that these numbers would produce an unusual result (but recall that the model correctly called 56 of 57 ridings in the 2011 election).

Nine seats would be the worst result for the New Democrats since the 1962 election, six would be the best result for the Liberals since 1990, and 42 seats for the Tories would be the best performance by any party in the province's history.

One imagines, then, that this could be rock-bottom for Greg Selinger's NDP and that they have nowhere to go but up. The Liberals have a new leader in Rana Bokhari, but she is not well known and it seems unlikely that she will replace the NDP as the alternative to the Tories. Pallister is in an enviable position, especially in facing a government that has been in power for 15 years and will have been in power by 16 or 17 years by the time Manitobans are next called to the polls.