New Abacus and Ekos polls

Here are the latest projections, using the latest polls from Abacus, Ekos (as well as Angus and Decima, but weighted less since they are older). As we can see, not much change again this week. Polls are pretty consistent across pollsters, even at the provincial level. Details riding-by-riding can be found (and downloaded as a pdf) here.

The Conservatives are still short of the desired majority. They have 126 safe seats (leading by more than 5%) and are involved in 26 races. This means that even in the best case scenario, they would still be 5 MPs short. However, with a good campaing and an aggressive targeting of some ridings, the Conservatives could actually get a majority.

The Liberals under Igniatieff are still doing only marginally better than under Dion, which says a lot. Of course Iggy didn't have the opportunity yet to offer his ideas during a campaing, but things don't look too well for this party.

The NDP is going down slightly but keeping most of its seats. As for the Green, they are in a race in only one riding, in Ontario (which makes me wonder why Elizabeth May doesn't want to run in this province...). As always, the Bloc has the easy life with 50 seats, thanks to the split of the federalist vote.

So basically, if an election was held tomorrow, we could expect a House of Common quite similar to the current one. In particular, even a coalition LPC+NDP would still be far off a majority.

Another interesting fact provided by the Abacus is the second choice of the voters. 56% of the Conservatives simply don't have one! This number is way higher than for any other party. Interestingly enough, NDP voters would favour the Green as second (33% of the voters), but then would split quite evenly between CPC and LPC (15% and 20% respectively).