Thursday, March 01, 2007

Are the National Polls Wrong On Quebec?

Decima has just released their latest poll and again I have found something quite interesting.

National Numbers:
Conservatives: 36%
Liberals: 27%
New Democrats: 13%
Greens: 12%

Ok, that's not what was interesting, I just wanted to gloat a little. The interesting bit is in the regional breakdown for Quebec:

Quebec Numbers:
Bloc: 35%
Liberals: 23%
Conservatives: 15%

Now compare that with the recent CROP polling numbers from Quebec (h/t Paul Wells)
Bloc: 36%
Liberals: 26%
Conservatives: 22%

And Leger's had the Conservatives at 24%

Now I know that Decima and CROP are within their margin of error, Decima's being quite high because of low number of participants for the regional numbers, but its a trend that I have seen quite a bit. The national polling numbers for the region of Quebec usually have the Conservatives with between 15-19% support and the provincial polling firms (CROP and Leger) put support for the Conservatives between 20-25% in Quebec. I'm not complaining, they might do this with the Liberal numbers as well if I had been as interested in them. It just seems that the national pollsters' numbers consistently don't jive with the Quebec pollsters'.

My theory is that Conservative support in Quebec is so concentrated that with a random sampling you can easily miss a lot of it when a small sample is taken. Hopefully this will equate to more seats but I guess time will tell.

2 Comments:

Blogger McGuire said...

generally the Quebec pollsters are the ones to trust on federal numbers there

Also Montreal skews the numbers as well. Take it out of the equation & things really change. Most Grit support in the province is concentrated there & the CPC is in the low teens

6:41 PM  
Anonymous tiendas eroticas said...

Goodness, there is so much useful information above!

10:57 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home