New Léger Marketing Poll: Bloc and Liberals Tied

Léger Marketing has released a new poll taken between June 25 and June 27 and involving 1,021 interviews - all from Quebec. Here are the results:

Bloc Quebecois - 35%
Liberals - 35%
New Democrats - 15%
Conservatives - 11%
Greens - 4%

This poll puts into question the results of both Nanos and EKOS over the last week, who showed a Tory bump in the province. This poll puts the Conservatives back into fourth place behind the NDP, who gets a very strong result. The NDP are in a bit of a nebulous position, with polls putting them either capable of winning two seats or likely to win none. The Conservatives are also difficult to track, and look either to go back to 2004 numbers or maintain at least a few seats in the province.

The Liberals should be happy with this number, which I believe is likely their high-water mark in any election. The Bloc shouldn't be too worried with 35%, but I would consider that the line below which they should start to worry.

The francophone vote, which determines the vast majority of seats in the province, is as follows:

Bloc Quebecois - 42%
Liberals - 30%
New Democrats - 15%
Conservatives - 11%
Greens - 3%

This sort of result is why the Bloc shouldn't be in panic-mode. They are still comfortably ahead in most of the ridings they currently hold. That the Conservatives aren't doing better in this demographic puts their Quebec City ridings into question, but the NDP should be happy that they're polling as well with francophones as with the province as a whole, as their winnable ridings are quite bilingual.

The poll also asked people which political leader had their confidence. The result:

Gilles Duceppe - 30%
Michael Ignatieff - 21%
Jack Layton - 20%
Stephen Harper - 11%

This puts Duceppe and Ignatieff swinging below their weight, but puts Layton in a good place for growth. Harper seems to be unable to reach beyond his party faithful.

The poll also looked into provincial politics, which will be the subject of an upcoming CentVingtCinq post.

Pollster Leanings - Update

I've updated the pollster leanings chart with CROP. They only conduct polls in Quebec, and it will come as no surprise that they are the least favourable pollster when determining Bloc support. CROP tends to poll the Bloc 3.7 points lower than the average. They are also unfavourable to the Greens (1.8 points lower), but favour the NDP (3.4 points higher), the Conservatives (1.3 points higher), and the Liberals (1.2 points higher).

This is the last pollster to be added to the chart. From now on, I will be updating the chart with more recent calculations as time permits.

This chart tracks how each pollster tends to lean when calculating support levels for the various parties, as compared to the average polling results from other pollsters each month. This does not necessarily equate to a deliberate bias, but instead is more reflective of the polling methods used.

The following chart shows each pollster's average variation from other polling firms. The numbers are the amount of percentage points a particular pollster favours or disfavours that particular party compared to other pollsters over a similar period of time.