Now, it’s only a one-day sample, but …

Looking at the latest CBC/EKOS poll, I can’t help but think that certain official opposition leaders — and the people who advise them — would prefer to see that little red line shoot off in the opposite direction on Tuesday night:

EKOS pollster Frank Graves suggests that it was the threat of a summer election that sent the Liberal numbers into free fall:

The daily tracking within this larger poll continues to show a high degree of volatility. The Liberals experienced a very substantial drop, for example, from Monday to Tuesday, while the NDP and Conservatives edged up. “Was this a reaction to the threat of a summer election, which we know from our previous polling, people don’t want?” asked Graves. “We have seen sudden spikes and troughs in the daily numbers before, sometime apparently unrelated to the flow of events. However, it is possible that the Liberals paid at least a momentary price for appearing ready to inflict an unwanted election.”

But what’s interesting to ITQ is that the NDP seems to have been the primary beneficiary of that last day Liberal slide, which suggests that it may not have been Michael Ignatieff’s pre-weekend musings about bringing down the government that caused his party to drop from the mid-to-high 30s to 29% overnight, but his subsequent retreat — which was well underway when the last sample was taken, even if the deal itself didn’t leak out until late that night. I guess we’ll have to wait until next week to see whether that was a one-day aberration. He did leave the arena with a blue ribbon, after all.

The complete results aren’t available on the EKOS site yet, but I’ll add a link when they go up. In the meantime, a few more highlights: