Williams party support drops nine points

Support for the Danny Williams Conservative party dropped nine points in three months according to the latest poll results from the provincial government’s pollster.

Corporate Research Associate’s quarterly poll showed that 58% of respondents indicated they would vote for the provincial Conservatives party if an election were held tomorrow.  That’s down from 67% in February.

The numbers are likely grossly inaccurate even with the correction presented here. The orange line shows the actual percentage of eligible voters who voted Progressive Conservative in the last provincial general election in October 2007. The blue line is CRA’s number, adjusted to remove their artificial inflation of Tory support.

The provincial government’s pollster doesn’t report the numbers this way, though.  CRA routinely inflates Tory support by as much as 28% by only reporting the percentage of decided voters.

These corrected figures also don’t account for the provincial government’s deliberate efforts to skew CRA’s polling numbers. As Bond Papers noted in late 2006, the Williams administration times its communications activities to correspond with their own pollster’s polling periods. probably one of the most significant examples of this would be the Premier’s disingenuous “have province’ announcement during the November sweeps month.

Local news media also routinely report CRA polls inaccurately by accepting at face value the CRA news releases.

Even allowing for problems with CRA’s polling, and for the government’s organized poll goosing efforts, that’s the largest quarterly drop CRA has reported for the Williams Tories since early 2005.

-srbp-