Categories: Andrew Coyne, Capital Read

The Tories are in trouble

by Andrew Coyne on Sunday, October 5, 2008 3:24pm - 134 Comments

Ignore the daily squiggles of each individual poll — they’re meaningless noise. But average them all together, track them over time, and a picture emerges. And it adds up to trouble for the Conservatives.

It’s disturbing enough that both Harris-Decima and Nanos now have them at 34% — the first time either pollster has put them below 35% since the campaign began. A week ago, Harris had them at 39, Nanos at 38.

But it’s the overall trend that should really have Tories worried. The chart below tracks the daily average of all of the polls taken since the first days of the campaign. It doesn’t take a statistician to see what’s been happening.

I know, I know: a few days ago I was pointing out that all the parties were within a percentage point of where they started. But that’s no longer true of the Tories, and in any case the better comparison point may be with where the parties were after the first week. Both the Tories and the Liberals have dropped several points since then — the difference being that the Liberals seem to have arrested their slide. (The NDP and Bloc started badly, but have both come on since then — only to hit their apparent ceilings.)

Another warning sign for the Tories: Stephen Harper’s leadership edge over his rivals, once the Tories’ ace in the hole, is eroding. Nanos, Harris, even Angus Reid (who puts the Tories at 40%) all show the same thing. Here, first, is a graph of Nanos’s composite leadership “scorecard” over time:

Still a ways ahead, but Dion and Layton are closing.

Now here’s Nanos’s “best prime minister” data:

Again, a slow deterioration, with Dion’s numbers recovering.

Now here’s data from Harris-Decima, showing “positive feelings” towards the various leaders:

Harper’s the blue line in the middle. While this chart is less favourable to Dion, the striking thing is that Harper’s numbers are the only ones to have declined in the course of the campaign. Angus Reid’s numbers show the same.

The debates don’t seem to have helped: even in the English debate, which Harper was said to have “won,” respondents in Ipsos’s instant poll said they had a lower opinion of him as a result of his debate showing – the only leader to suffer such a fall.

I don’t want to make too much of this. But if you’re running a policy-lite “leadership” campaign, and the air is leaking out of your leader, you better hope you can get to election day without crashing.

Tags: conservatives, debates, Election Watch, Stephen Harper

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southernontarioan

Ekos is now showing a Tory drop and so is SC’s swing riding polling.

Now, I’ll say that I’m worried Harper is losing control of this thing. We’ll find out for sure in one week.
catherine

Look at these polls coming in.
Today Harris-Decima has the Conservatives at 31, others have them at 32 and 33. The LOWEST the Conservatives polled in the last two weeks of the 2006 election was 35%, with some as high as 42%.

This is looking pretty good (if you are not a Harper supporter). Hope the trend sticks.
boudica

Wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if Harper ended up losing an election that he forced on his opponents?
Andrew

It’s full-on desperation time. Watch out for some pretty crazy antics coming from Harper and the Little Shop.
http://www.dysfunctionalparrot.wordpress.com Dysfunctional Parrot

The CBC is going to be pulling out all the stops in the next few days. They smell blood.

Expect Dion and Layton to get nothing but a free ride and the last word on just about everything.

http://dysfunctionalparrot.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/liberals-resort-to-bribing-media/

-DP
http://demosthenes.blogspot.com Demosthenes

It’s full-on desperation time. Watch out for some pretty crazy antics coming from Harper and the Little Shop.

And, sure, enough, in the next post…
raysay

I think Harper misjudged the electorate’s appetite for a majority Government.

Harper does not understand that Quebeckers use a different song sheet at election time than the one one they sing from between elections. Between elections Quebeckers want money, jobs, and pork to flow to Quebec. During an election they want politicians to reflect their core values: nationalism, culture, language, and their much more democratic socialist preferences in governments. Lose track of any of those during an election, as the Conservatives did, even after hand feeding feeding the money, jobs, pork, and core value recognition before the election. And the Quebec voter melts away.

In Ontario, Harper failed to see that voters never really wanted an election as much as they wanted to see the squabbling in Ottawa stop: between Liberals, between Parties in Parliament, and between Party leaders. So they gave the appearance of wanting an election to decide things for a while – until they heard the same old squabbling during the campaign. Now they can’t seem to decide who is best for Ontario. And, after all, that’s what counts for Ontario.

Harper can’t be faulted for what’s going on in Atlantic Canada. Newfoundland has opted out, his Lieutenants in NS and NB have been floundering (excuse the pun) over fish, fishing, and pogey since they were still PC’s. And however hard the voter pretends to like the Conservatives between elections, the Liberals always remind them during an election that the Conservatives are the reason they all have to move west to be Canadians.

Harper has it mostly right in the West, but then he forgets how much the East hates him for the West loving him. And the West has too few seats to give him the majority he set out to get.

All this from me – a lifelong conservative. What a country we live in. And for poor Harper it’s not, “Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.’, it’s ‘Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’enfer.’
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Darlene Comfort

I am proud to be a conservative and pray for a majority ; its the other party leaders that terrify me and as a taxpayer, I do not want money thrown at problems, schemes such as the liberal ‘green shift tax’, increasing liberal taxation, and erractic last minute economic plans. Give me a conservative ‘Harper’. Yea!!