As the country comes out of the long-weekend stupor, a few people noticed a poll released on June 29 by Environics. Nationally, it shows a very small lead for the New Democrats over the Conservatives. That’s a modest change from May when the Tories were slightly in front of the New Democrats.
What caught some local Twitter attention was the post by threehundredeight.com and the headline “Majority support for federal NDP in Newfoundland & Labrador?”
The question mark is there for a reason, as you will see in a moment.
The Environics release didn’t have the Newfoundland and Labrador numbers. They came as an exclusive to Eric Grenier, the guy behind threehundredeight.com. Like the national survey numbers, the Environics numbers for Newfoundland and Labrador don’t include 18% of the people surveyed in Newfoundland and Labrador who refused to answer, indicated they would not vote or had no choice. Incidentally, all that information and the following detail came from Grenier, via Twitter.
Here’s a table of the results as reported by Environics/Grenier and as “actual”, meaning as a percentage of all respondents. All but the last line (the “N”) is a percentage. Margin of error is reported as plus or minus 8%, 19 times out of 20.
| Reported | Actual* | |
| New Democrat | 59% | 48 |
| Liberal | 22 | 18 |
| Conservative | 18 | 15 |
| Green | 1 | 1 |
| UND/Will not vote | NIL | 18 |
| Total | 100% | 100 |
| N = | 153 | 196 |
In a survey of eligible voters like this one, the choices that Environics discarded are as valid as all the others. There’s no solid reason to re-distribute them - which is another way of describing what Environics did - but some pollsters do it.
Anyway, with a margin of error of eight percent, this poll is pretty much as useful as a set of random guesses for doing anything. You can feed it into a seat distribution algorithm to see what comes out. Speculation like that can be fun sometimes and once in a while it can be useful but when poll results get this far out, even the spec isn’t useful either. One suspects that the question mark in Grenier’s title reflects all of that.
Incidentally, Environics’ national survey report included Newfoundland and Labrador as part of the Atlantic region.
-srbp-
* Apart from the 196 figure and the 18% for UND/will not vote, the other math is SRBP’s deconstruction of the numbers as reported by threehundredeight.com.