Quick.
Where’s Kathy Dunderdale today?
A new poll by advertising agency M5’s opinion research firm will give you a clue.
The poll replicates the actual numbers for CRA’s August omnibus when both are adjusted to remove the distortion of reporting voter choice as a percentage od decideds.
The MarketQuest Omnifacts poll showed the provincial Conservatives with 42% of respondents, the New Democrats at 23% and the Liberals at 145 with the undecideds at 20%.
The margin of error was plus or minus 4.9%, 19 times out of 20.
The CRA corrected numbers were 40 Tory, 18 Dipper, and 16 Grit with 26% undecided.
Run that through the Amazing SRBP Vote-a-matic and you get a possible seat result of:
- PC: 38
- Libs: 4 to 7
- NDP: 3 to 6
So contrary to what Kathy “New Energy” Dunderdale said on Day One of the campaign, the polling shows the Tories will lose seats. The question is more one of where they’ll lose them and to whom.
if you want an idea, consider that on the basic math of it the Tories have gone from 70% of votes cast to 53% of decided voters. Bear with this for a second and switch back to using the numbers everyone else is using.
That’s a drop of 17 points since the last general election.
If you look at the seats the Tories won by a margin of 17% or less in 2007, this is what you get:
- Lake Melville
- Bellevue
- Labrador West
- Bay of Islands
- Torngat Mountains
- Humber Valley
- Isles of Notre Dame
On the face of that list right now, your humble e-scribbler would add an extra New Democrat in Labrador West to a future House of Assembly with the other seats being ones where the Liberals are historically strong and would likely pick up.
That would give you 10 Liberal seats total and that’s outside the Vote-a-matic forecast range. Just remember that this is a highly inexact subject. What you can take away from it are places to look for further signs or information. And after all, when the poll results have a variation of five percent give or take, you are really not dealing with scalpel-like precision anyways.
For those who want to quibble, too, that this result would show the Liberals gaining more seats with fewer votes than the New Democrats, you need to appreciate that this set of observations on seats is based on taking polling and applying it against history, against what happened before.
Add to that the concept of vote efficiency and how it works in the current system.
The best example to use is the 1989 general election. The Tories got more votes, but the Liberals took 34 seats on election night. The Tories, for example, tend to show very well in polls. They rack up tons of support in districts in St. John’s but once they’ve gotten enough votes to win the seat every one after that is a waste.
Well, it’s a waste from the standpoint that they didn’t need it to win.
Meanwhile over in another district – most likely off the northeast Avalon – the Tories are starving for votes. The Liberal vote is distributed such that lots of votes don’t get wasted racking up margins beyond what you need to win.
Same thing applies, essentially, for the NDP. They’ve got a couple or three pockets of strong support. It’s been enough to win two seats, historically. And that’s about it.
Historically, you’d translate those polling numbers out and get a result in which the Tories could drop seven seats to the other two parties.
You likely won’t see this from the conventional media, but then again, the conventional media can’t get much beyond the superficial horse-race commentary.
All you can do, dear reader, is take it all in, weigh it out and make up your own mind.
Oh yes.
And notice where Kathy Dunderdale is today.
Labrador.
- srbp -
