We are getting really close to the federal budget and the polls keep coming. And they keep showing a huge lead for the Conservatives. The last one, from LegerMarketing, show a 13 points lead nationally for the Tories, and a big 14-points lead in Ontario. Getting high numbers in this province is naturally the key for a majority (since it seems pretty obvious that the Conservatives have given up any hopes they had to increase substantially their number of MPs in Quebec.

The Liberals are down pretty much everywhere, with the Atlantic being their only dominant region in this poll. At only 27% in Ontario, they would win only 29 seats in this province. Can you imagine that in 2000, this aprty could win all but two seats in this province?

The NDP holds up pretty well everywhere, except in BC where this poll puts this party last. On the other hand, this is another poll placing the NDP very high in Quebec, at 20% for second place! We have seen this trend going on for a while and I'm convinced that the NDP will be a real contender in this province next time. Probably not in term of seats (the party can only dream of 2-3 max), but at least in terms of percentages. Imagine this aprty with Thomas Mulcair as leader...

The Greens are projected to win one seat, Guelph. While I'm always skeptical of polls for the Green party, I have to wonder why the heck did Elizabeth May chose to run in BC... I'll post about that another day. But I sometimes think that she isn't actually interested in being elected.

At the end, if we indeed go in election, it's gonna be very interesting because we would start it by having a virtual Conservative majority. And this would be new. Yes in 2008, we were wondering if the Tories could get a majority or not, but it never was very likely (until the middle of the night of the election!). But this time, it is completely possible and it should therefore affect the dynamic of the campaign. Speaking of which, according to you, what does Igniatieff need to do to remain leader of the Liberals? I think it's pretty safe to assume that a CPC majority would send him back to Harvard. But what about another minority? How many seats does he need to gain compared to Stephane Dion? I'm not sure about this.

In its latest poll, Ekos asked the second choices, as well as asking who they voted for in 2008. I always find those questions very interesting.

For the retention rate, we see that the Conservatives are the best. They would keep 77.3% of the people who voted for them in 2008. The Liberals would keep only 63.8%, while the NPD and Bloc stand at respectively 61.6% and 73.8%. Surprisingly, the "lost" voters of the Liberals would actually go the the NDP (13.3%) and the Green (14.2%), more than to the CPC (11.5%). This is one of the only good news in recent weeks for Igniatieff: it seems he has a pool of potential voters in the Green and NDP. In case of an election, I think it's likely that those people could quickly come back to the Liberals if te prospect of a Tories majority becomes real. Of course, for the Lib, keeping the voters of 2008 is hardly enough to make some gains in term of seats. But it's a start.

The second choices show how the Conservatives are different. Indeed, they are the party with the most voters that have no second choice at all (as much as 48.6%!), while this number is only around 25% for the Liberals or NDP. I was also surprised to see that among Green voters, the second choices are split almost evenly between the NDP and the Liberals. I was expecting the NDP to have the edge here.

So using those numbers, let's do a little bit of math. In particular, let's see what would happen if the Bloc didn't exist in Quebec, and what would happen if the Green party didn't exist. For each scenario, I will also input those calculated numbers into my model, even though the model is not meant for that. I'm assuming that people without a second choice would simply not vote.

Scenario 1: No Bloc.

	actual	no Bloc	seats
cpc	15.4%	22.3%	20
lpc	21.7%	30.6%	36
ndp	12.5%	23.8%	13
green	11.3%	19.3%	6
bloc	35.9%	-	-
other	3.2%	4.0%	0

In term of percentages, the NDP would be a clear winner. However, in term of seats, the Tories would actually get all the forteresses of the Bloc (in rural Quebec). The Green would get as many as 6 seats, but this is only because in this poll, they were already high. As opposed to the projections using this Ekos poll, the CPC would gain 12 seats, the LPC 19. the NDP 12 and the Green 6.

Scenario 2: No Green Party of Canada

Here I'm assuming that the second choices are the same in every province, since Ekos doesn't provide us with the provincial breakdown.

	actual	no Green	seats	gain
cpc	35.2%	37.9%	137	0
lpc	27.8%	31.2%	84	-4
ndp	14.9%	17.9%	34	2
green	10.1%	-	-	-
bloc	8.8%	9.6%	50	2
other	3.1%	3.5%	0	0

In term of seats, not many changes, even though the Green Party seems to be costing the NDP, 2 seats and 2 other seats to the Bloc, both at the expense of the Liberals. Since the Tories don't suffer any overall loss, it seems the Green party is only affecting the distribution of seats among the other parties. If you want to compare province by province, here is the breakdown:

Ekos projections:

Ekos No Green:

You can see that at the province level, the absence of the Green party would also affect the Conservatives. But at the end, it seems that the Green party is not big enough (yet?) to actually change the colour of the government or cause substantial seat cheanges.

We just got two new polls, from Angus-Reid and Ekos. The latter shows a little fall back for the Tories, while the former actually show a big lead for this party. Using only the AR poll, the Conservatives are projected at 154 seats, thus a majority (remember I don't project the three territories) while the Liberals would get only 71. On the other hand, by using only the latest Ekos poll, the Tories stand at 137 seats only. When using those two polls as well as the other recent ones from Nanos, Ipsos and Harris-Decima, we arrive at the projections illustrated in this post. Details are here.

So it seems there is some kind of volatility. AR conducted the survey online between March 8th and 9th, while Ekos conducted its survey between February 24th to March 8th. That could explain the reason, even though given the recent scandals affecting the Tories (court decision about the 2006 election and the in-and-out funding scheme; Oda; etc) we could have expected the opposite: the survey conducted recently only should show the Tories lower. In any case, if you actually apply the margins of errors, most changes are not significant.

One thing to notice in the AR poll is the 20% for "other parties" in Atlantic Canada. Did I miss something there? Was there an independant candidate who announced he would run? The talk of a new party? Because 20% is really high.

Also, the two polls show the Bloc falling slighlty in Quebec, to around 35%. They would still get a lot of seats of course, thanks to the stupid electoral system and the division of the federalist vote, but there could be something there. How low can the Bloc actually go?

So, does it look like we are going in elections? I really don't know. There are talks that the Liberals could use their opposition day, March 21st, to bring the government down (or at least try to) but I find it very unlikely that the three opposition parties would trigger an election one day before the budget. After all, the general population isn't that aware of the recent scandals.

I'll post right after about the second choices and the retention rate of each party, regarding their 2008 voters. Some interesting stuff there as well, from the Ekos poll.

Here is a comparison with 308. I used his numbers and inputed them in my model. You can compare these results to 308's ones here. Both models give similar results, even though there are still differences in the Atlantic and in Ontario. For the former, my guess is it depends if we assume that the effects such as the ABC campaign are gone or not. I might revise my decision to assume that 50% of those effects are gone later. Depending of some polls during the next campaign.

At the end, with 308 and DemocraticSpace (whcih I'm sure we'll be active during the campaign), I think people have enough choices regarding riding-level projections (you also have other sites, such as cdn election watcher). I personally see the different models as all providing some truth. A little bit like it's better to have more than one poll, it's better to have more than one model. Even though, at the end, for one specific election, one model will of course be better. And so far, only my website allows everyone to use the model.

Here are the latest projections using an average of all the recent polls. Since most of them gave the Conservatives a big lead, the new seat projections are naturally more favourable to the Tories. They are getting very close to a majority. You can see the details here.

By the way, I'm glad to see that 308 has finally updated his model and is now able to make riding-levels projections. I'm particularly glad to see that his projections are now much closer to mine, especially regarding the Liberals and the NDP. I have been complaining for months that 308 was underestimating the NDP and overestimating the Liberals. So it's good to see that 308 has finally admitted there was a problem.

Oh I would like to just add one comment about the recent debate regarding polls. I love polls, of course. But I have to admit that pollsters make me sad sometimse. In particular, I hate when the pollsters improvice themselves as political analyst and give us, along their new numbers, the reasons as to why a party increased or not. Not only are those changes within the margin of error most of the time, the fact remains that to assess whether one news really hurt a party or not, you need much more than a simple poll. After all, I completed my undergrad with a minor in political science and I had to read electoral studies. When you do, you realize how complicated it can be to determine the effect of one issue. So I'd really appreciate if pollsters could simple improve their methodology, calculate the margin of error correctly and stop thinking they have a ph.d in political science. For instance, I think that one big mistakes of almost all polls is that they don't interview comitted voters only. How can you interview 1000 people, get their vote intentions and think it's perfect? When you know that on election day, more than 40% of people won't vote?

When a party's support increases in a province, how does it translate in each riding? The answer to this question is crucial as to which forecasting model to choose. So let's look at some graphs.

Let's look at the Conservatives (a party who experienced quite a lof of changes at the provincial level during the last 5 year), in Quebec (where the model usually performs at its best, both for the federal and provincial elections) during the last election (2008). The next graphs displays the swing at the riding level, sorted by the level of support during the previous election:

Remember that province-wide, the Conservatives dropped from 24.6% to 21.7%, thus a decrease of 2.9 percentage points, or -11.8%. Therefore, if the swing was uniform, we should see all the dots on the same horizontal line, at 2.9 (red line). On the other hand, if it was proportional, we should see the dots as forming a straight line decreasing (representing -11.9% of the previous level of support) (green line). As we can see, both assumptions would clearly be wrong. There is considerable amount of variation between the riding-level swings. You have an easy-to-understand graphical representation of how those two simplistic models could be wrong.

By the way, you get similar plots if you use other parties and/or provinces. Just to prove that I didn't use the one example that proved my points, here is a similar graph for the Liberals in Ontario, in 2008.

Here, I didn't bother showing the proportional change line, since it is obvious it wouldn't fit the data. Rather, I added the projection of the model. While I agree it isn't very clear that the model is performing better, what I would like you to notice is that the projected values are not on a straight line. Using regional effect, incumbency or the level of support last election, (for each party) my model is able to better forecast the outcome, without having to rely on an arbitrary assumption such as uniform or proportional changes.

Let's go back to the CPC in Quebec. Another aspect that might be surprising is the fact that the Conservatives actually increased their share of votes in some riding, despite a drop at the province-level. How to explain this? Well, first of all, individual effects could play a role, such as a new candidate or other specific events (for instance, what happenned to Maxime Bernier). Second of all, we are looking at shares of votes here, meaning that even though a party lost some votes, it could still increase its share if the other parties lost even more votes. For the model, I project every party and then make sure the percentages sum up to 100%. However, on e downside of the fact that riding sometimes go against the provincial trend is that my model could lead to weird results. Indeed, since I'm estimating my coefficients, the model could give parameters such that the support for one party would decrease in one rding when this party increases at the provincial level. This can be a potential problem but since I'm using more than one election, hopefully those weird effects will not biase the estimates.

At the end, it is really difficult to find evidence that the swing is proportional, especially in Ontario and Quebec. This is the reason the proportional swing model performs significantly worse than any other models, incuding the linear one, as shown in my methodology pdf. And this is why I find it weird when I see some websites basing their model on this assumption.

I'll post soon about how proportional models can even be worse for small of third parties.

A new poll from Ipsos-Reid was released today (and thus the interviews were made before the court decision regarding the electoral spendings of the Tories). The Conservatives are standing at 43%! The Liberals are at 27% and the NDP at 13%. In Quebec, the Bloc would enjoy a level of support of 41%.

Translated into seats, that would give the Tories as many as 169 seats, including 151 safe! Only 54 for the Liberals and 29 for the NDP. The Bloc would get 53 MPs and fall one short to be the official opposition for the second time in history. But be very carefull with this poll, as some of the regional breakdowns seem very odd, to say the least. For instance, the Tories are at 52% (!!!) in Atlantic. This is far above the huge poll from Angus-Reid released yesterday. Also, in Quebec, the Liberals are a lot higher than usual, and the NDP a lot lower. Small sample size is probably the issue here.

In any case, here are the riding-by-riding projections. For regular readers, since the poll show the Tories and the NDP so far from previous levels of support in Atlantic, I used a simple linear model for this region. Again, my model is not meant to be used for extrapolations as big as that.

I'll update the general projections using an average of all recent polls later this week (I'm expecting a new Ekos poll). But just so that you know, even the projections using an average start showing a Conservative Majority. Do you smell elections?