Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Interesting Data from the Latest Ekos Poll

Ekos has some very interesting new questions they asked which add some idea of the depth of support for party versus the breadth.   The results are not that surprising to me, but more of a confirmation of what I thought was the case.

Ekos has asked for sometime about what people's second choices were, and this gave some data to judge the parties by.    Normally the Conservatives have had the largest number of people that have no second choice, which says to me the people voting Conservative are more hardcore and dependable.

The new questions are about voter commitment, voter enthusiasm, likelihood of not changing their mind, likelihood of voting, voter retention, and unwillingness to consider other parties.

                  Cons Libs NDP Bloc Green Other
Voter Commitment   5.7  4.9 5.2 5.7  4.8   4.6
Voter Enthusiasm   66   53  60  51   46    31
Not changing mind  79   70  67  72   67    77
Likelihood to vote 87   82  84  84   73    56
Voter retention    79   60  33  72   30    30
No second choice   47   19  18  29   22    42

One trend you can see is that the Conservatives lead in all categories.   In some categories the gap is small, in others huge.  

The other obvious trend is that Greens are last of the five major parties in all but one category and most of the time they are way back.   I think this data explains the long term gap between the Green result in the polls versus the results on election day.  

So how do I apply this data to the polling numbers?   I think the numbers leave the Bloc, Liberals and NDP in the same range but indicate the Conservative vote on May 2nd will be higher than the poll and the Green vote will be lower than the poll.

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