April 1st: Conservatives drop in Atlantic

Note: Every day, a post is dedicated to the newly released polls and projections are made using those polls only. This shouldn't be considered as the official projections of this site as they are less accurate since based on less polls. The "latest projections" based on an average of most recent polls are available in the right column of this site and are updated every 3-4 days.

First of all, I would like to say two things. 1) Welcome to the new readers that came after reading my article on the National Post. I'll have such an article every week. 2) I thought about doing an April's fool with a post such as "Ignatieff can expect a majority according to latest poll!" but at the end, I decided not to. Maybe I would have attracted and fooled one newspaper!

So today we've got the weekly Ekos poll as well as the Nanos daily update. In the latter, the Liberals drop a little bit, after a big surge yesterday. The Conservative remain high and still have a very big lead in Ontario. The Ekos poll is more in line with the other polls and show the Liberals around 26%. One region where the two polls are widely opposed is the Atlantic. This is probably due to the sample size (seriously, having a rolling average of 99 observations is almost ridiculous. It means every day they add 30 observations and drop the oldest 30 interviews. The accuracy is clearly weak).

Based on an average of those two polls (with more weight given to the Ekos poll given the sample size), you get the dailies projections displayed in this post. The main reason the Tories are down is naturally the Atlantic (where the CPC is really behind according to Nanos). Hopefully, we'll soon get more polls to determine where the parties stand in this region.

One thing where both polls agree is about the Bloc, which is projected at 36%. That would mean this party would experience another drop in terms of percentages and lose a couple more seats. You can say what you want about the Bloc but there is definitely a trend going downward for this party over the years. Of course, thanks to the division of the federalist vote, this formation can still get over 40 MPs, but this is really the only reason. I said it before and I'll say it again, the Bloc could well disapeared if two reformes were implemented: abolishing public funding (as suggested by Harper) and the introduction of proportional representation. But this is another debate of course.

I really wonder what would happen if, on Election Day, the actual results was like this one. Would we really simply go back to another Conservatives minority? With the same instability and political drama every confidence votes? I find it quite crazy that it could actually happen.