polls are for dogs

He’s not going to quit. Paul Wells has the reasons why.

Paul Wells looks at the paradox now possible in Quebec

You could pretty much set your clock by it: Two weeks of disdainful coverage about how Tom Mulcair just doesn’t understand how much he’s blundering into a powderkeg are followed by today’s National Post poll, featuring the largest NDP margin over other parties that I have seen since things got weird for a minute in 1988, or maybe the best poll ever for the NDP.

A new poll reveals evidence of a population applying consistent values in a difficult situation

Everyone’s going to be talking about the giggling Bob Rae ad the Conservatives finally get to unleash, five years after they prepared similar ads on the assumption Rae would win the 2006 Liberal leadership.

A cautionary tale about polling. La Presse is on fire this morning with news of horrible performance by the NDP in Quebec. A CROP poll has the party down to 29% in Quebec, its lead over the second-place party diminished from 14 points to 5 since December. This would seem to make my blog post from December germane again. The one about how the NDP, which has more than half of its caucus in Quebec, now has to pick a leader to “consolidate” a “hold” on Quebec that is becoming less and less of a hold.

If New Democrats chose a leader with roots in the province but residence outside it, they’d only be doing what they did in 2003

I’m glad I took pains to say trends can change when I gladdened the hearts of Conservatives everywhere with this blog post only two days ago. Just about all the trends have changed. Nanos now has the Conservative top-line national vote down to essentially where it was in 2008; other national polls put that vote lower. In Ontario, Nanos has the NDP vote above its 2008 level on an upward trend. Other polls I’ve seen put Conservative vote in that province lower than Nanos does. The NDP vote is entering territory where it starts to endanger Conservatives in some place, where before it mostly helped them by splitting the anti-Conservative vote with the Liberals. I won’t guess about where this is going, because I have no reason to believe support for every party is done shifting radically.

WELLS: A year’s polling shows an extraordinarily stable electorate

The “sideways Ekos V” is what you get if you tilt your head to the right and look at the CBC-Ekos poll results for party preference since about January 10, and especially if you look at the results over the past five weeks. In the New Year, Conservatives and Liberals were trading at rough parity, but since then the Liberals are trading at a substantial discount.

Our their Kady has the results and analysis. The regional numbers seem odd.

A new poll has the Liberals in a dead heat with the Conservatives