Neck-and-neck federal race

Two federal polls were released last week showing a very tight race between the governing Conservatives and the opposition New Democrats. While the two surveys differ on what kind of momentum the Tories have, both show that the NDP is making significant gains, primarily at the expense of the Liberal Party.

The Léger poll is the most recent, and is also the most striking. It places the New Democrats ahead of the Conservatives with 33% to 32%, a gain of seven points for the NDP since Léger's last national survey of Feb. 28-Mar. 5. The Tories, meanwhile, are down two points.

The Liberals slip five points to 19%, back to where they were in May 2011. The Greens are up one to 8% while the Bloc Québécois is down one to 7%.

The New Democrats lead in Atlantic Canada with 49% (+18), Quebec with 47% (+20), and British Columbia with 34% (unchanged). They are running second in the Prairies and Ontario with 26% support in each (a loss of seven points in the Prairies and a gain of three in Ontario).

The Conservatives lead in Alberta with 61% (+2), the Prairies with 49% (+8), and Ontario with 39% (unchanged). They place second in British Columbia with 30%, a drop of six points since late February/early March.

The Liberals are second in Atlantic Canada with 20% (-17) and in Alberta with 17% (+5), while the Bloc Québécois is second in Quebec with 29% support, a loss of two points.

Atlantic Canada has huge variations in this survey, so the region's results can probably be discounted. The big NDP leap in Quebec is not so unusual, however, as other polls have indicated that the NDP has made a major rebound in Quebec with Thomas Mulcair as leader. That the NDP has supplanted the Liberals as runner-up in Ontario is good news for the party, as they need to make more gains there. Overall, however, the Conservatives are in a strong position thanks to their big leads in Alberta and Ontario.

Those big leads were echoed in Harris-Decima's older poll, taken between Mar. 22 and Apr. 2. Part of the survey was conducted before the Mar. 24 NDP leadership convention, but probably not enough to have skewed the results very much.

Harris-Decima keeps the Tories in the lead with 34%, a gain of three points since their previous poll of Mar. 8-19. The New Democrats are up four points to 32%, while the Liberals are down five points to 19% support.

The Greens are up one to 8% while the Bloc is down two to 6%.

There are fewer unusual results in this Harris-Decima poll, at least in terms of the variations since their last survey. Both Harris-Decima and Léger agree on the situation in Ontario as well as in Quebec, while giving the NDP the lead in B.C. and on the East Coast.

But the Conservatives lead in Alberta with 54% (-4), the Prairies with 45% (-2), and Ontario with 41% (+8). They are trailing the NDP in British Columbia (30%, -3) and Atlantic Canada (also 30%, +4).

The New Democrats lead in British Columbia with 44% (+9), Quebec with 39% (+13), and Atlantic Canada with 36% (+2). They place second to the Conservatives in the Prairies (34%, +3), Ontario (26%, -3), and Alberta (19%, +6).

The Liberals are only tied for second in Atlantic Canada with 30%, a loss of three points, while the Bloc is down 10 points in Quebec to 24%.

Both of these polls would result in a similar situation in the House of Commons: the Conservatives with a plurality of seats but the NDP and Liberals able to combine for a majority.

With Harris-Decima's narrow Conservative lead, the Tories take 147 seats to 119 for the NDP, 36 for the Liberals, five for the Bloc, and one for the Greens.

With Léger's narrow NDP lead, the Conservatives take 134 seats, the NDP 132, the Liberals 34, the Bloc seven, and the Greens one.

Regionally (Léger first, Harris-Decima second), the Conservatives win 14/12 seats in British Columbia, 27/27 in Alberta, 23/19 in the Prairies, 67/73 in Ontario, 1/5 in Quebec, 1/10 in Atlantic Canada, and one in the north.

The New Democrats win 15/21 seats in British Columbia, 1/1 in Alberta, 2/7 in the Prairies, 23/22 in Ontario, 66/58 in Quebec, 24/9 in Atlantic Canada, and one in the north.

The Liberals win 6/2 seats in British Columbia, 3/2 in the Praires, 16/11 in Ontario, 1/7 in Quebec, 7/13 in Atlantic Canada, and one in the north.

If we take the best and worst regional results for each party, we get a range of between 128 and 153 seats for the Conservatives on these numbers, with the New Democrats sitting between 108 and 143 seats. The Liberal range is between 24 and 46 seats - even a best-case-scenario results in only a minor gain of seats for the Liberals.

The New Democrats are only slightly above the 31% the party achieved under Jack Layton in May 2011, but the extra point or two makes all the difference, particularly when the Tories are down six to nine points. The NDP is in a strong position on the two coasts and looks capable of keeping (or even increasing) their representation in Quebec. But the Conservatives still have the advantage thanks to their wide lead in Ontario and the clump of seats they hold claim to between B.C. and Manitoba. Until the NDP can start to whittle away the Tory holdings in the West and in Ontario, they will have no hope of toppling the Conservatives without the help of the Liberal Party.

Wildrose lead over PCs narrows

Wildrose is still on track to win a strong majority in Alberta's provincial election, but the margin between it and the governing Progressive Conservatives has narrowed over the past week.

Though the projection was updated yesterday afternoon to reflect the latest Léger Marketing poll, it is more helpful to compare today's update (which also includes the new Forum survey) to that of Apr. 5, when a batch of polls were added to the projection model. This allows us to contrast the changes in the aggregate rather than how the individual Léger and Forum polls have shifted the projection back and forth.

Since Apr. 5, Wildrose has slipped 0.4 points to 40.9% support. The PCs have picked up 1.2 points and now sit at 33.4%, a narrowing of the margin between the two parties by 1.6 points.

The Liberals have dropped 1.1 points to 11.1% support, while the New Democrats are up 0.4 points since Apr. 5 to 10.8%. The Alberta Party is down 0.2 points to 2.1% support.

Due to this shrinking gap, Wildrose is now projected to win 56 seats, down two since before the Easter weekend. The Progressive Conservatives are up two seats to 26, while the New Democrats are unchanged with four seats and the Liberals with one.

But the polls are beginning to agree with one another less, meaning the likely vote ranges have widened significantly. Wildrose is now projected to take between 35.9% and 45.9% of the vote, a much greater range of likely outcomes than that of Apr. 5 (39% to 43.5%). The Tories are likely to take between 30.5% and 36.3% of the vote, overlapping only a little with Wildrose.

The Liberals would take between 9.6% and 12.6% of the vote if an election were held today, while the New Democrats sit between 9.2% and 12.4%. The Alberta Party would likely receive the support of between 1.4% and 2.8% of Albertans.

This wider range of outcomes means a wider range of likely seat wins: Wildrose would win between 33 and 76 seats if an election were held today, compared to between 9 and 52 seats for the Tories. This runs the gamut between PC disaster to majority, though anyway you slice it Wildrose is poised to make historic gains. Of course, something near the projected result is the most likely, so the chances of the Progressive Conservatives forming a majority government or being reduced to single digits are quite low.

The New Democrats should win between one and seven seats (the first indication that the NDP could actually suffer losses) and the Liberals between one and three seats.

Almost all of these Liberal and NDP seats are expected to come in Edmonton, where the two parties are neck-and-neck in the battle for third place. The Liberals have the inside track, but have lost one point since Apr. 5 and now sit at 14.7% support. The New Democrats are down 1.2 points to 14.6%, while the Alberta Party is down 0.4 points to 3%. All three parties are well behind the Tories and Wildrose. The PCs are up a point to 36.9% while Wildrose is up 1.4 points to 29.2%, though their likely ranges overlap a little: 33% to 40.7% for the Tories and 24.7% to 33.7% for Wildrose.

Calgary vote projections

The best piece of news for the Progressive Conservatives, however, is in Calgary. They have gained 1.9 points and two seats since Apr. 5, though they still trail Wildrose with only 32.3% support. But it is a reversal of a slow decline in the city, as the chart to the left shows.

Wildrose is up 0.9 points to 46.3% and is projected to win 24 seats. After the blip that was caused by the Léger poll, Wildrose is back to making gains in Calgary.

The Liberals, however, are down significantly. Since Apr. 5, they have slipped 2.9 points to only 10.1% support. Note that the Liberals took  32.7% of the vote in the city in 2008. That is a remarkable collapse for the party.

The New Democrats, however, are up 0.2 points in Calgary. They are out of the race in the city, though, as they have only 7.4% support.

That betters their 6.5% support in the rest of Alberta, a drop of 1.1 points since Apr. 5. Wildrose leads here with 52.5% support, a gain of 0.9 points. The Tories are down 0.3 points to 29.9% while the Liberals are treading water, picking up 0.1 point to reach 7.1% support. The Alberta Party is up 0.3 points outside the two main cities and are projected to have the support of 2.1% of voters in this region.

The two polls that have come out so far this week are somewhat divergent, and this is the main reason why the projection ranges are currently so wide. Léger polled over the Easter weekend, and found that the margin between Wildrose and the PCs had shrunk by 6.1 points. Wildrose slipped 5.8 points since their poll of Apr. 2-4 to 35.5% while the Tories gained 0.3 points to reach 34.2% support.

Forum's poll, conducted on Monday, instead found the gap between the two parties to still be very wide: 12 points. Wildrose's support (43%) was unchanged from the Apr. 2 poll, but the Tories picked up two points to hit 31%. The numbers and margin might be quite different (as are the methodologies used, the number of Albertans surveyed, and the field dates), but these two polls do seem to indicate that the race is tightening up.

This is, perhaps, not too surprising. Wildrose stormed ahead early in the campaign, and now that Albertans are paying more attention to their policies and candidates there is a bit of blow back. Both Léger and Forum showed that some of the key campaign promises of Wildrose are not very popular, and this kind of momentum was never going to be sustainable.

I expect that the gap will continue to narrow in the coming days, making tomorrow night's debate all the more important. Danielle Smith can solidify her lead with a good performance, or she can lose that lead by allowing Alison Redford to define her and her party as unprepared for office. How Brian Mason and Raj Sherman, the NDP and Liberal leaders, will treat the two frontrunners could also be a factor. If they focus on Smith, they might push her fence-sitting voters over to the Tories. If they focus on Redford, she will have to spend part of the debate defending herself rather than going after Smith. It should be interesting to see how it plays out, and how the numbers move over the weekend.

Note: The riding-by-riding projections can be accessed by clicking on the "Alberta Riding Projections" banner at the top of this page, while full regional breakdowns can be accessed by clicking on "Regional Vote and Seat Projections" in the right-hand column. You can also check out which polls are included in the projection and their relative weight by scrolling to the bottom of this page. These features are unavailable on the mobile version of the site.