Friday, August 19, 2016

Digging into the details of this week's poll

There is a lot more detail in the Innovative Research poll that came out yesterday than what is out in the media and I thought I would look at some of the more interesting things I can find

Issues

If we group issues into larger broad categories - take the numbers with a grain of salt because I am using the existing rounded numbers and not the raw results

Economic Issues 33% - more than half of this is affordable housing
Govt programs 19%
Environment Issues 13%
Social Issues 6%

They asked how likely people were to vote for a party which I find an interesting measure because it shows if the support is deep or not.

Here are the results for "Definitely" and "Very Likely" versus "Would Never Vote For" for each party

Party     +    -   net
Liberals 26%  22%  -4
NDP      19%  27%  -8
Greens   14%  28% -14
BCCP     11%  29% -18

As you can see the Liberals enjoy a significant advantage

Looking at the two major parties in a couple of sub groups
      under 35  35-54  over 54
Party     +       +       +
Liberals 25%     24%     28%
NDP      24%     17%     19%

Among younger voters the NDP is very close to the Liberals but still behind as you get to older groups the NDP falls behind

by region
       Van/LM North/Int Van Isle
Party     +       +        +
Liberals 29%     23%      21%
NDP      22%     15%      20%

They also have a table looking at how people said they would vote compared to how likely or they were to support the NDP and Liberals

What this table shows is there someone that is willing to seriously consider the NDP but does not vote for them is more likely to vote for the Liberals than the Greens.

Another thing that stands out is the high result for the BC Conservatives in the Not Very/Would Never category for both parties.   It says to me there is a group of conservatives in BC that hate both the NDP and the Liberals.   

The Liberals have a significantly better number for getting the vote or the people that would seriously consider their party than the NDP does.   That together with the size of the category means the BC Liberals have a much larger safe core pool of support than the NDP.

Now if we look at people that are open to voting for a party, Somewhat likely or better in the poll, here are he results.   This is a good measure of the theoretical ceiling for each party

Party     +   

Liberals 55%   
NDP      46% 
Greens   41%  
BCCP     32%  

This is very bad for the NDP.   For them to win they need to get almost everyone open to voting for them to vote for them.   At the same time the Liberals can achieve a win with about 80%

However you slice it, this is a very bad poll for the NDP.   If the data is a good reflection of reality the NDP has to do something drastic to change the landscape to be able to win.

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