Ekos Tracking Poll

Ekos have been doing a weekly federal tracking poll all summer with 1800 to 3000 responses per week. Erik of threehundredeight.com does a good job at looking at what all the polls mean for a potential election result. I am only going to offer a few observations I have made from looking at the run of polls for the summer.

1) The results are very consistent over the summer, the only changes are a mild rise for the NDP and the Conservatives and some loss for the Liberals.

2) Among voters under the age of 25 there is really no party leading with the four national parties all within about 10%. The big news out of this is how badly both the Liberals and the Conservatives are doing with the youth vote. The up side for them is that the youth will not be voting in the next election.

3) Among seniors it is a two party race. All summer the Conservatives and Liberals have held about 4/5s of the seniors vote. This is the demographic most likely to vote and these results are not good for the NDP, Greens or Bloc.

4) There is a shortage of competitive areas in the country for an election. The polls show over and over again that in the majority of the ridings in the country, there is not any question of the incumbent party losing the seat.

5) Ontario is a two party race, the NDP is only marginally ahead of the Greens. This is not good at all for the NDP and places half their seats in the province in jeopardy. Meanwhile even though the Greens are up in support in Ontario but nearly enough in any sort of concentration to allow them to win any seats. It seems their best bet is in south western Ontario, but they remain a long shot there to even come second.

At this time the polling does not indicate that there is any benefit to anyone to take the country to the polls. The consistency of the results also indicates there has not been any movement that might give anyone any hope of a good election result. Until there is some dramatic political event to change the current status quo, there is no reason to expect an election anytime soon.

The party that seems to be most ready for any election are the Conservatives as they have more money in the bank than the rest and they have 159 candidates nominated for the next election. In total 260 candidates have been nominated for the 41st Federal Election. Admittedly this is because the Conservatives have re-nominated all the sitting MPs that plan on running in the next election.