The NDP surge in the polls seems to have come to an end. At the very least the the NDP-PC gap has been shrinking over the last few days. At this point, unless there is a very late surge, I think it's fair to say a clear NDP win in the popular vote is unlikely (but not impossible). By clear win, I mean going over 40% and beating the PC by 5 points or more.

This means that projections models like mine are showing the Tories ahead and favourite since the popular vote is almost tied. Vote efficiency has always assumed to be helping the PC. What I'm a little bit surprised by is the magnitude of the inefficiency of the NDP vote. Earlier this campaign I had found that the NDP probably needed to win by 2 points in order to win the most seat. But as the Liberals have slowly but surely fallen to 20% and below, the same analysis now shows the NDP would need to win by almost 5 points! That's what my model shows and I obviously trust it. But I can't help but feel I'm doing something wrong.

1. The inefficiency of the NDP vote

So, why would the NDP vote be so inefficient? Let's look at the projections by regions.

Two regions offset each other: Central and Northern Ontario. The latter is going PC and all 11 ridings are projected to elect a PC MPP. On the other hand the North is currently projected to go all NDP. So that's 11 vs 11 (my "North" is slightly smaller than the definition of others, not going to change it now). With that said, the PC has a chance in some northern ridings such as Sault Ste. Marie or Kenora-Rainy River. In Central Ontario the NDP would really only have a shot in York-Simcoe.

The Southwest and Midwestern Ontario (Kitchener, etc) are two fairly competitive regions. The NDP is projected to win 7 out of 11 in the SW (London and Windsor help a lot). In the other region, the PC is winning 7 out of 11 (and it's not sure the NDP can really prevent the Green from taking Guelph). So again, it mostly cancels out.

In the Hamilton-Niagara region, the NDP is edging the PC 7 to 2, nothing surprising.

Alright, so far the NDP is actually ahead. It leaves us Toronto, the GTA and the East.

In the East, the PC wins 6 out of 7 (only Kingston and the Islands is going NDP). In most cases the margins of victory is comfortable (10 points and more). Even if all the OLP votes were to go NDP, the PC would still win those seats! So let's say the East compensates for the Hamilton-Niagara region.

In the Ottawa region, it's currently 7 PC, 1 OLP and 1 NDP with a couple of clsoe races in Ottawa itself.

Next Toronto. It's interesting that for once we have an election where the core urban center of the province is competitive, including for the right-wing party. Urban centers have become electorally boring in the 21st century with the Conservative party being unable to even compete (remember how hard Harper had to fight to finally win seats in Toronto and one in Vancouver proper in 2011?).

Polls show the NDP well ahead in Toronto, at the expense of the Liberals. if there is one place where strategic voting to avoid Ford has happened, this is it. Right now the projections have 1 seat going Liberals, 11 going PC and 13 going NDP. This is by far the most competitive region with multiple 3-way races. The 3 Don Valley ridings are pretty much toss-ups at this point (projections have the PC winning all 3 but by very small margins. Riding polls were even less favourable to the NDP's chances there, but I already talked about how riding polls seemed to underestimate the New Democrats). All the Etobicoke ridings are leaning PC but it's close in at least 2 of them. Scarborough is a giant mess currently leaning NDP. Only the core downtown is probably less uncertain (and even there, it depends if the Liberals hold better than expected).

The city of Toronto is clearly the one region where anything can happen. I expect the projections to potentially be right overall (total number of seats) but having a lot of cancelling mistakes.

Alright, so we are left to the culprit of the inefficiency of the NDP vote: the 905. I'm talking of York-Durham and Peel Halton. So ridings like Ajax, Markham etc in the east and Mississauga and Brampton  in the west. The PC of Doug Ford is currently projected to win 22 seats there versus only 7 for the NDP! This, right there, is why the NDP isn't favourite.

Could my model be wrong? Well my model is already nicer to the NDP there than the riding polls. These show the PC crushing it in Mississauga for instance and even winning two of the Brampton ridings (and the other two are won by razor thin margins by the NDP!).

Polls and projections agree: the PC isn't crushing the 905 in terms of voting percentages. The Tories are winning by around 5-7 points. But it's winning most of the seats by far.

Can this be changed? Even if I somehow boost the NDP and decrease the Tories by a few points, I still have the PC winning 21 seats! This is because out of the 22 projected wins, the PC has 12 by a margin of 15 points and more (over the NDP, I'm leaving the Liberals behind here). On the other hand the NDP has 4 close wins out of the 7 it wins!

In other words: the GTA isn't about to break NDP anytime soon, at least not based on what we know. And this is giving the PC an advantage that is almost insurmountable. At this point the only way I could see the NDP having a path to victory is if they breakout in the city of Toronto (helped by a collapse of the Liberal vote).

2. The impact of the Liberal collapse.

When the OLP dropped from 25% to 20% (in average), it helped the PC a lot more than the NDP. This is particularly true in urban ridings like the ones in Toronto and Ottawa. Basically it just created more vote splitting between the OLP and the NDP. If the Liberals want to help the NDP (obviously the party itself doesn't...), then one of two things need to happen. Either the Liberals voters need to move away from the OLP and massively go to the NDP. Or they actually need to show up and vote for the OLP. From the point of the view of the NDP, every seat taken away from Ford is good news, even if it means the OLP getting more than 3 seats. Either it causes the PC to finish second overall or it at least forces a minority.

3. How can the NDP win?

There are mostly two paths to victory.

1) "Brute force" scenario where the NDP just wins the popular vote by 5+ points. It doesn't flip most of the 905 but it's enough to pick up seats elsewhere.

2) The surge in core urban areas scenario. In this one, the NDP needs to change the electoral map significantly. It would need to crush it in Toronto, possibly helped by a collapse of the Liberal vote. Out of 11 seats projected to go PC, 5 are by less than a 5 points margin and another 3 is by less than 10 points. Then you need the same in Ottawa. In this scenario, the NDP could go and grab an extra 5-10 seats from the PC. That brings the total to 60-60 pretty much. In this scenario, the NDP also needs luck in the sense that it better wins all the close ridings in the North, Guelph, etc.

So, that's pretty much it. As it stands there is no question the Progressive Conservatives of Ford are favourite. Scenario 1 here above is becoming less and less likely and would require a pretty important polling error. How likely is scenario 2? I can't really tell, or at least I can't quantify it.

Note: no new projections this morning as we didn't really get any new poll yesterday except the Mainstreet tracker (where the NDP is back in second place). Not enough change to justify redoing everything. Just refer to yesterday's projections.

Transposing polls into seats is nice and it works quite well if you have the correct voting percentages. That's a big if. We all remember the Alberta election of 2012 of the BC one of 2013 where polls were way off. This is why representing the uncertainty that exists is so important to me.

Think of the 2016 US election. Using a poll average, Hilary Clinton was clearly favourite. It is simply a fact that based on the information available before the election, she was the most likely to win the presidency. And whether you were reading 538 or another site, they all mostly agreed on the average expected outcome (Hilary Clinton winning with around 300-320 electoral vote). Where sites didn't agree was on the level of certainty they had of this outcome. 538 was the least bullish with Trump being given 28.6% chances of winning. This is way more than most other website or aggregators, some of which literally had Clinton's chances at over 99.9%!

Why am I talking US election? Because I believe we currently have a situation where some aggregators aren't representing uncertainty correctly. I'm talking here in particular of the well knwon CBC poll tracker (from Eric Grenier, previously at 308). As I'm writing this article, the CBC is saying the NDP has a 12% chance of winning the most seats (8.4% for a majority, 3.6% for a minority). My model on the other hand is currently giving the NDP around 24% chances (and that's a sharp drop compared to the >40% of a few days ago, before polls started showing a slight PC rebound).

Part of the difference come from a slight difference in our polling aggregation. The CBC has the NDP ahead by 0.7pt (37.3% versus 36.6% for the Tories) while I have the NDP ahead by around 1.5pt. This is because the CBC gives a lot more weight to very recent polls when I go with a more simple approach of giving equal weight to any poll conducted during the last week. Also, the CBC is currently giving the highest weight to the latest Forum poll... I don't think I need to add much more here.

But that's only part of the story. The CBC model has had the NDP with lower chances than me since the beginning. As a matter of fact the maximum was at 17.4% chances! I find it absolutely insane. And I truly believe this is incorrect.

Now, here comes the hard part: it literally is impossible to prove who is right here. The only way would be to have this election repeated a 100 times in 100 universes and see how many times the NDP wins. That is obviously not an option. So on election night, even after knowing the actual outcome, it wouldn't prove one model right or wrong (unless the outcome was one given 0% chances by us). In other words, even if the NDP wins, we wouldn't know how big of a surprise it was.

So I won't really try to convince you of who is right and who is wrong. Instead, I want to show how I come up with the chances of winning.

First of all, a probabilistic model must be properly calibrated with respect of the average polling accuracy. I have already written about this topic here. The summary is that polls in Canada have been decent but not perfect in the last few years. In average they are 1.92 points off (1.25% if we exclude the big two mistakes of Alberta and BC but then it becomes cherry picking). Beyond the average, the actual margins of error of the polling average have been 5.68%! Or 3.19% if we remove the two outliers. In other words: polls aren't bad but even after averaging them, there is still considerable uncertainty.

So right there we see that based on the average accuracy, we can have the following outcomes (NDP first, PC second): 37-37, 39-34, 35-38, etc. And based on the margins of error, we can't exclude a scenario where, for instance, the NDP is at 42% and the PC at 32%. It's not likely but absolutely possible (2-3% chances of this happening).

Let's focus on the NDP 39% (so underestimated by 1.5 points roughly in the polls) and PC at 34% (so overestimated by 1.8 pts). This scenario wouldn't even count as a surprise on election night. Or it shouldn't if you know anything about polls. At around a 5 points lead, I think it might be enough for the NDP to win (the current simulator shows a close race with these numbers however. I would call it a too close to call situation). With the collapse of the Liberals, my estimations show that the necessary lead for the NDP to win is increasing. Also, let's realize that when a party moves from 23.75% in 2014 to 39% in 2018, projection models like mine aren't the most accurate. This is a massive shift of the electoral map. So it is absolutely possible that the model is underestimating the vote efficiency of the NDP.

So, given the polling average, what are the odds of the NDP winning the popular vote by 3, 4 or 5 points? Using simulations calibrated to the average polling accuracy, we can easily answer this question. The table below shows these odds based on my polling average:

Probabilities that the NDP will win the popular vote by
3 points	36%
4 points	28%
5 points	21%

The graph below shows the possible outcomes for the popular vote. Specifically, it shows the difference between the % for the NDP and the % for the PC. and yes I'm aware it isn't a very pretty graph but you get the meaning.

So now the question really becomes: how inefficient is the NDP vote? Can the NDP really win by 4 points and still lose? The answer appears to be yes, as crazy as it sounds. The collapse of the Liberals has opened so many seats to the PC in the 905 and increased the vote efficiency of the Tories.

Right now, my most recent estimations show that the NDP probably needs 4-4.5 points lead in order to win the most seats. This is pretty crazy. It used to be 2 points but that was when the Liberals weren't as low as 20%. At the same time my simulations show that it is possible for the NDP to win if this party is only winning the popular vote by 1 points. It's unlikely but possible. If the NDP is ahead by 3 points, the chances of a NDP government are roughly 12%.

If we take into account the possibility that the polls will be off and the fact that the distribution of the vote will have a big influence (and could be mostly unknown after such a massive change in the Ontarian political landscape), I think it is fair to say the NDP has some chances. This party is clearly not favourite at this point but a NDP victory shouldn't be seen as a crazy unlikely event. In particular are these chances as low as 12%? I don't believe so. I already think that the 24% chances my model is giving the NDP are too low.

A few weeks ago I wrote this article showing that, at that time, vote splitting between the Liberals and NDP was not the reason for a possible Tory victory. This was back when the Conservatives of Ford were close to 40% and had a comfortable lead.

The situation have of course changed a lot. The New Democrats of Horwath are nopw ahead in the popular vote and the seat lead of the Tories have shrunk (they are still favourite though). So time to re-do the analysis.

As for the first time, I used the second choices as given by Mainstreet and Innovative, they are both very similar and haven't changed much from last time. Basically, the OLP and NDP have each other as main choice (by a good margin) while a majority of PC voters doesn't have a second choice. Those of do prefer the NDP over the Liberals.

So, what are the results? The table below shows you what would likely happen in two possible scenarios. In one the OLP wouldn't exist and I redistributed the Liberals vote according to their second choices. In the other I did the same with the NDP.

It does appear that there is now enough vote splitting going so that the Conservatives of Doug Ford wouldn't win if the OLP didn't exist. It's not surprising. With the NDP being so close behind the Tories, imagine if they were to receive a boost of almost half of these votes while the PC would recover barely 13%.

Interestingly, the Liberals wouldn't be able to prevent a PC majority if the NDP didn't exist. This is partially due to the fact there would a slightly lower transfer of votes from NDP to OLP than in the previous scenario. In general though, the lead of the PC over the OLP in many ridings is just too big and the seat wouldn't be flipped by redistributing the NDP votes.

This is obviously due to the current electoral system. If that bugs you, you can try to vote strategically. There are many resources out there. Just know that this is a very uncertain exercise and unlikely to work (as it requires many other people to do the same). I'd also like to mention that the OLP dropping has helped the PC more in the last week since many seats in Toronto are now narrowly won by the PC. So it's not sure what would happen if some OLP voters were to switch to the NDP. For instance, one of the last 3 seats projected to go OLP is Vaughan-Woodbridge. But the PC is projected second there. If 5% of the Lib vote were to switch to the NDP in that riding, that would flip the riding from red to blue.

Not a long article today as I already wrote a long text about how provincial and riding polls don't agree with each other. Just a quick projections update.

We got a ton of polls! Like really, it's like the election is tomorrow. The average moved quite a bit with the PC now less than 2 points behind while it was over 3 yesterday. The chances of winning are now further from the quasi toss-up of yesterday as well. I'm starting to believe that the NDP will need a late campaign surge if Andrea Horwath wants to win next win. Make no mistake though, there is still considerable uncertainty.

Voting intentions; Seat projections with confidence intervals; Chances of winning the most seats

Possible outcomes:

Riding by riding projections

   Ontario Proj 31.05.2018 Detailed by bryanbreguet on Scribd

My projections are based on what I believe to be the easiest numbers to be able to predict: the province-wide numbers for each party. I base my model on the province-wide numbers because these will be the most accurate numbers provided by the polls, much more than regional or riding level data. With that said, I do make further adjustments if my regional averages are too far away from the polling ones. And when we have riding polls, even though they are less accurate, I do an average between them and my projections when the latter are 5 points or more off.

The problem right now is that the riding polls, all conducted by Mainstreet as part of their daily tracker (you need to pay $30 to have access) absolutely do not match up with my projections. This could obviously mean my model is wrong and this is indeed possible. But the riding polls also don't match with the current province-wide numbers. And this is problematic.

How different are the two types of polls? The province-wide ones show a close race with the NDP slightly ahead (in the popular vote) while the riding polls are showing a landslide Conservative victory.

Since the riding polls are behind a paywall, I can't reveal the numbers. But I can talk about general trends and differences.

There have been 38 riding polls published so far. We don't have the exact dates (Mainstreet said they'd add this info) but they were all published over the last week (and the discrepancy between polls and projections have been more pronounced in recent days). Ridings are pretty much all over the province, from the North (Kenora-Rainy River, Sault Ste. Marie, etc), the East (Ottawa South and West-Nepean, Glenngarry-Presscott Russel, etc), the SW (Sarnia-Lampton, etc), the golden horseshow (Guelph, Kitchener-Conestoga, etc) or the GTA (Toronto Centre, multiple Brampton ridings, etc). It's a fairly varied "sample".

If I compare my projections to these polls (when they were published of course), I currently seem to be overestimating the Liberals by 2.2 points and the NDP by a whopping 5.2 points while I underestimate the PC by 3.4 points. This is significant, it means the average PC-NDP gap is almost 9 points off. This leads to multiple ridings where I see the NDP ahead but the riding polls have the PC first. In some ridings, my model is projecting the NDP significantly up compared to 2014 while the polls have them barely higher.

So again, at first, it seems more likely that my projections are wrong. And for a while I thought this was the case and I made the necessary adjustments. But the more polls we get and the more I think the issue is bigger than that.

If we average the 38 polls, we get the table below. I also added the average deviation with respect to my projections.

If I only use the riding polls published during the last two days, then the projections are underestimating the PC by 4.6pt and overestimating the NDP by 7.4! So the problem got worse.

By the way, I realize some of you might object that these 38 ridings can't be a good "sample" of the entire province (think for instance if you only polled ridings in the 416, your results wouldn't be representative). I did a simple average of the results of 2014 and found 42%, 30% and 21% for the OLP, PC and NDP respectively. This compares fairly nicely to the official province wide results of 39%, 31% and 24%. So while not a perfect sample, it's also not overly skewed. And anyway, when I compare them to my projections, the bias, if there is one, should be the same.

If riding polls were simply providing extra information, I shouldn't have a systematic over or underestimation with my projections. I should sometimes overestimate the NDP and sometime underestimate it. But it is clearly not happening.

Notice also how the average difference between polls and projections match up with the overall difference. Take the 38.8% and subtract the 3.4 points, you get 35.4%, almost exactly the current polling average. Do the same for the NDP and you get 31.7%+5.2%=36.9%, there as well almost exactly the average.

What this shows is that my projections are doing a good job at transposing the province-wide percentages into riding ones. Therefore the average of my riding projections will give you the NDP ahead by around 2 points, as it should. The riding polls on the other hand are showing a situation where Doug Ford and the Tories would still be largely ahead and en route to a landslide majority.

Landslide majority based on the riding polls isn't an exaggeration. If the Mainstreet numbers are right, the PC is about to win the entire 905, all of Central Ontario and Eastern (minus 1-2 seats in Ottawa). It would also win most of the Southwest including ridings we'd think the NDP would be ahead such as Sarnia-Lampton. The PC could even be competitive in the North. So really, the entire province minus some seats in the core urban environments. We are talking a 75-80 seats majority here possibly (what the projections were showing 2 weeks ago basically).

The province-wide polls (along with regional polling averages) show a very different situation, one where the NDP is crushing it in Toronto, competitive in some of the 905, ahead in the Southwest and the North. This would be a close race with a slight edge for the PC.

I don't know why the riding polls are so different. Maybe they were conducted a while ago? It's not even a Mainstreet bias as their provincial polls are in line with others. I'll ask Mainstreet about this. But for now, I can't use the riding polls. I believe the provincial ones more and therefore my projections more. I'll use the data of some of these polls such as Guelph (showing the Green competitive) or the ridings in the North. For the rest? I'll remove the adjustments for now.

Riding polls cost me two correct calls last year in BC and I think that this article should convince you that they aren't telling the same story. So I have to make a choice as to which polls I trust. And the choice between multiple province-wide ones or some riding ones is easy. After, I may be wrong and will regret it next week, but at least you know where I stand.

As we got more polls yesterday (Mainstreet tracker, Pollara and Innovative), a trend is emerging: the NDP is rising again. Let's just look at the swings between the last polls for each firm:

	PC	NDP	OLP
Pollara	-5	5	-1
Innovative	-2	5	-4
Mainstreet*	-1.2	3.4	-1.6
Ipsos	1	-3	-4
Abacus	-2	3	-1
*Comparing the last two full trackers

There is an obvious outlier to the general trend (Ipsos) but otherwise everybody seems to agree: the NDP is rising while PC and OLP are dropping.

This is why the polling average now has the NDP with a fairly comfortable lead. Yes some of it is due to the Pollara poll that has the NDP at 43% (!) but the trend is there.

The most up to date projections are:

(Note: I Tweeted yesterday that my projections were showing 49% chances for both the NDP and PC. That was true but I then made other adjustments, mostly based on riding polls).

Despite the trend and a fairly large lead for the NDP in the popular vote, the projections still have the Tories ahead! How come, right? Well, I was just as puzzled as you. So here are some explanations.

1. The riding polls (all from Mainstreet) are absolutely terrible for the NDP. To the point where I can't explain some of the results. According to Mainstreet, the Tories would actually be competitive in the North and win ridings I thought were fully safe for the NDP. In other ridings like Hasting-Lennox and Addington, the PC would be currently crushing the NDP by 34 points! The NDP would actually barely have increased since 2014 despite being up almost 14 points province wide. This makes no sense to me whatsoever. This is happening in many other ridings. Based on these polls, my projections are overestimating the NDP in the East, GTA, North and the Southwest. And by double digits sometimes.

So I included some of the polls but I excluded others for now. But it remains that those adjustments are giving the PC a couple more wins and making its vote even more efficient. I'll have to decide how much I want weight I want to give to those riding polls...

2. The model is currently projecting the PC to win a large majority of the close races (margins of 5% or less) it is involved in. Specifically, the PC would win 21 out of 29 races. That seems high. This would require a really good GOTV and/or some luck. On the other hand the NDP only wins 6 out of 19. Imagine a more likely "success rate" of 50%, the PC would then be at 62 seats and the NDP at 55, a much closer race already. I'll have to take a better look at these ridings in the next week.

3. Ultimately we are back to the topic of vote efficiency. I had previously written that my calculations were showing a 50-50 race if the NDP had a 2 points lead over the PC. My new estimations show that the NDP might actually need a 3.5 points lead! So why is that? And no I'm not actively trying to make the NDP lose. Here is what I found. The main difference is that the OLP is now at around 20% instead of 25%. And as unintuitive as it sounds, the Liberals dropping that low is actually helping the Tories!

You can use the simulator to see how it works. Leave the PC and NDP where they are and increase the Liberals to 25% (yes it doesn't add up to 100% anymore but forget it for now). Did you see what happened? The PC dropped from 68 to 59 seats while the NDP only lost one seat! What this means is the vast majority of seats the Liberals have lost by dropping from 25 to 20% have gone to the Conservatives. We are talking of ridings like Don Valley West, Eglinton-Lawrence, Glenngarry-Prescott-Russel, Orléan, half of Mississauga or Ottawa South.

Most of those are part of the close races mentioned in 1.

It really is a weird situation right now. The PC is dropping, the NDP is rising but vote efficiency is increasing for the PC and keeping this party ahead. But make no mistake, this is a much more precarious lead than what they had before. Yes the PC is still projected at 65+ seats but this party is now in a situation where it could easily lose. A small overestimation by the polls, a more resilient Liberal votes in some key ridings or some NDP surge thanks to young voters (in Toronto for instance). Any of those (plus others) and Andrea Horwath wins the most seats.

Here below are the distribution for the main three parties. As you can see, the ones for the PC and NDP overlap quite a lot. And the NDP's upper tail actually goes further. Notice also that the Liberals, at 4 seats, would clearly be scoring on the low end of their distribution and this party has the potential for way more than four seats.

So don't focus too much on the 68-52, focus on the 55% vs 43%. This is almost a toss up. Factor in the trend mentioned at the beginning and the NDP isn't in a bad position. Also, it is important to realize that the NDP is experiencing a massive swing upward compared to 2014 while the PC is barely up. So my projections might be quite off for the New Democrats. Models like mine are much better suited to forecast riding level results when the swing is small.

With that said, imagine if the NDP were to actually win the popular vote by 3 points but the PC were to get a majority! That could be the best argument for electoral reform in a very long time.

   Ontario Proj 30.05.2018 Detailed by bryanbreguet on Scribd

Important notice: please do NOT use the numbers of this poll/experiment and tweet them. It was an experiment only. Plus, the poll was actually done last week, so the numbers aren't relevant anymore.

This is the question I asked myself when I saw that we could order individualized Google Surveys.

Some of you probably know what I'm talking about. You can install the Google Opinion Rewards app on your phone and once in a while you'll receive surveys. Usually this is to ask you what you thought of a store you went to (or Google thinks you went to through tracking). You answer and you get a magical 10-20 cents that you can use to buy apps, music and movies on the Play Store.

Ok, I know what some of you will say: this isn't a valid poll! This won't work! This is the same as those non-scientific polls on websites.

Not quite. Google has a robust database (not shocking) and can provide a good sample. In the 2012 US election, the second best poll was actually from Google Survey! There is a page about using it for election. There is a template that is recommended for best results (using a two question system where you first ask people how likely they are to vote).

So look, I'm not trying to argue that a Google Survey is equivalent to a well designed poll by another firm. But if you think this is equivalent to those Sun Media polls on their websites for instance, you are dead wrong.

Ok so as an experiment I decided, last week, to order a poll. I only asked one question because if you ask two, the cost increases significantly (instead of 20 cents per answer, it was over $1!). I asked the following question: "If the Ontario election were held today. Which party would you vote for or are you currently leaning towards?"

And I offered a randomize choice of the parties with the leader's names as well as the "undecided" and "will not vote" options. The poll took 3 days, from May 22nd to 25th to collect the request 1000 observations. It was quite slow at first, which was disappointing, but picked up quickly at the end. I asked Google to ask the question in English to residents of Ontario aged 18 and over.

Ok, enough already, what were the results? Here they are below, in raw, unadjusted form:

Remember that this poll was done between May 22nd to May 25th. Unfortunately for me, I picked the few days where the NDP surged. I could actually see it by looking at the questionnaires coming in. As reference, the polling average around that time was (excluding the Forum poll as I think it's an outlier and I don't have enough polls conducted between the 22nd and 25th to compensate for its crazy results) 21% OLP, 37% PC and 35% NDP (and around 5% Green).

It says 1000 respondents but Google actually indicates that I only have 631respondents once weighted. Once the undecided and wouldn't vote are removed, we have roughly 400 respondents. A survey of that size would have margins of error of 4.8% 95% of the time. So the polling average actually falls within the results of this poll once we account for the margins of error. Except for the "another party". There is an obvious overestimation here. This makes no sense and I can't explain it right now.

My results are quite similar to the tracker from Mainstreet published on the 23rd (it was around 21-38-34 at that date)!

At 28%, this survey also got way more undecided than most polls (between 5% and 15% depending on the firm). To be fair, I only asked one question and even though it said "leaning towards", it might explain partially why I got so many undecided.

So, was the experiment a success? Kinda. I haven't played with the raw file, trying to reweigh the data (which is possible since I have age and gender data from most respondents; I, however, do not have the region or city) to see if I could "correct" the weights to get better results.

I also lost a lot of observations to the wouldn't vote or undecided, so a more serious experiment would require a higher budget to increase the sample size.

Still, I find it pretty interesting that I was able to go online and order a poll for only $200 and this poll's results can actually be reconciled with the polling average. Plus, as I said before, my poll was done during a period of rapid growth for the NDP. The PC had a much bigger lead for the first day and the NDP slowly but surely caught up.

Would it replace a true poll from a known Canadian pollster? Of course not! But there is some potential there. I wish Google would allow regional breakdowns though.

I'll gladly share the raw data file with whoever wants it. Just reach me on Twitter or by email and tell me why you'd want the data. I only asked that you link to my site and mention my name if you'll use the data for a blog post or anything.