Latest Angus Reid survey of public opinion on politics in BC

Angus Reid released their latest survey of the BC political landscape and little has changed since their previous survey in mid January.   Here are the headline results:

• BC NDP      47%(+1)
• BC Liberals 31%(+-0)
• Greens      10%(+-0)
• BC Cons      9%(-1)
• Other        3%(+-0)

In fact there has been little movement from their November survey.

The survey was done after the throne speech and after the budget.   It seems that they have had little impact on public opinion.

I normally do not pay much attention to what the opinions are about the leaders but in trying to get some more idea of what might be happening I thought I would look more closely at them than in the past.

What is interesting is that when you look at if public opinion improved, stayed the same or worsened of the parties and leaders over the last three months, it was worse for all the parties.   Christy Clark and John Cummins both have had dramatic negative shifts in public opinion, "momentum scores" of -36 and -24 respectivly.  Adrian Dix had 21% say their opinion improved and 28% worsened for an overall negative momentum for -7, which is much better than the other two but still going the wrong way.

No one seems enthused about any of the parties and there is no indication of any change that would indicate the Liberals have any hope of doing well in the election.  In fact the data says to me that the Liberals may not have hit rock bottom.

When asking about approving or disapproving of the leaders, here are the results:

Leader        Approve  Disapprove Not sure
Christy Clark 31%(+-0)   58%(+2)   11%(-2)
Adrian Dix    43%(-3)    41%(+7)   16%(-4)
John Cummins  15%(+2)    49%(-2)   36%(+-0)
Jane Sterk    24%(+1)    26%(-3)   49%(+1)

What is interesting in this table is that the approval numbers are not far from party support levels for three of parties, yes the NDP is 4 points higher than Adrian Dix and John Cummins is 6 points higher than his party.  It is the Green Party results that look out of sync with the others.   Jane Sterk is 14 points ahead of her party.

The numbers are not directly comparable because the total of all the approval numbers do not add up to 100 but saying you have a positive opinion of a leader should indicate you are willing to consider voting for the party.   It says to me that the party that has space to grow significantly are the Greens and this is not only because the leader is more positively received by the public than their party but because the party has the largest number of people out there without an opinion yet.