Friday, April 1, 2011

Nanos polling numbers

Nanos is the only polling company to have been releasing daily figures for the election.   They are releasing polls of about 1200 people each day, though they are three day rolling averages, this means 400 responses are new each day.   They are getting about 78% of people having an opinion.

  • Date                Cons     Lib        NDP    Bloc   Green
  • March 31        39.4       31.7     16.1      8.5       4.4
  • March 30        39.1       32.7     15.9      8.7       3.7
  • March 29        38.4       28.7     19.6      9.1       4.1
  • March 15        38.6       27.6     19.9    10.1       3.8
  • Feb 14            39.7       26.6     18.9      9.9       4.9


This is only one company and I have some issues with their numbers, but then there is no company out there that I do not have issues with their methodology and systemic errors.  As a reminder, my big issue is that the pollsters find a lot more people have an opinion on who they support than people that will actually vote in the election.

My comments on the five Nanos Polls:
1) Greens
The Nanos numbers for the Greens are the lowest of any pollster.  Most pollsters end up with numbers for the Greens that are higher than what they get on election day, Nanos seems to be going in the other direction.

Interesting is that the Greens have had no bump from the debate issue in the Nanos polling.   There have been two nights of polling since the debate issue made headlines.

2) Liberals
There seems to have been a boost for the Liberals in the last few days taking them over 30%.  The five percentage point shift from the Nanos poll in February is significant.

I need to some other numbers from other companies to see if there is a trend towards the Liberals or not.   If I were to guess, I would say that people that would have responded NDP are now responding Liberal.

3) NDP
The NDP has clearly taken a drop in support across the nation, though because the very small regional break out numbers, the part of the country where they took a hit I do not think can not be confirmed with any honest precision.   It does seem like they are down in BC and Ontario, very bad for Layton because this could mean losing a lot of seats.

4) Bloc
The Bloc seems to be down in Quebec but the support seems to be equally spread between the Conservatives, NDP and Liberals.

So just based on the sort of trends of these numbers and keeping in mind the regional break out numbers are not really much better than random numbers, the Conservatives are likely to be closer to a majority but still short.   The Liberals gain between 15 and 25 seats.  The NDP loses 10 to 20 seats and the Bloc loses 5 to 8 seats.

I would like to see some of the other polling companies come out with some more numbers to see how their pre-writ and election period numbers compare.   Is there a Liberal resurgence happening?

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