MQO's quarterly omnibus poll shows some curious changes in public opinion about provincial political parties. The province-wide numbers are not curious: the changes in a couple of the regions are.
Let's take a look first at the provincial numbers. As usual, SRBP presents the results as a share of all responses, including the refused/undecided/no answer folks. That's why the numbers here are different from the ones used by MQO in its own release and reported by local news media. Go to the end of the post for a brief discussion about the way the data is presented.
MQO kindly provided the data tables for this analysis free of charge. The data collection methodology is theirs. Interpretation of the data here is solely SRBP. There is no business or other relationship between SRBP and MQO to create a conflict of interest.
Contrary to media reports, support overall in the province for the governing Liberals didn't change in the last two quarters of 2018. The Liberals had the support of 29 percent of respondents in Q3 and 28 percent in Q4. Support for the Progressive Conservatives declined by four points - 25 to 21 - while support for the NDP went from 11 percent to nine percent. The number of respondent who refused to answer, were undecided, or planned not to vote grew by five points (from 36 to 41 percent of responses).
