TORONTO -- The Liberal and Conservative parties are in a statistical dead heat, according to a new Nanos Research survey, even though more voters prefer Liberal leader Justin Trudeau as prime minister.
The Nanos nightly tracking commissioned by CTV News and The Globe and Mail asked: If a federal election were held today, could you please rank your top two current local voting preferences?
More than 35 per cent of voters said they would vote for the Liberals, while nearly 33 per cent said they would vote for the Conservatives. With an error margin of ±2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, the first day of results for the nightly tracking showed the two parties are virtually tied.
“Many times for voters, they see elections as imperfect choices, where they don’t really like anyone 100 per cent. This particular election has put a spotlight on that in spades,” said pollster Nik Nanos. “There’s no break out moment or any big advantage that anyone has had.”
NDP comes in third, with 16 per cent of voters saying they would cast their ballot for the party, while the Green Party has 10 per cent of voter support.
Four per cent of respondents would vote for the Bloc Quebecois, while the People’s Party of Canada has 2 per cent support.
The Nanos survey also asked eligible voters: Of the current federal political party leaders, could you please rank your top two current local preferences for prime minister?
Nearly 35 per cent of respondents said they preferred Trudeau, while close to 25 per cent said they preferred Conservative leader Andrew Scheer for prime minister.
Trudeau maintains an advantage on the preferred prime minister measure, but one in five remain unsure, Nanos said. Just over 19 per cent of those interviewed said they did not know which party leader they preferred for prime minister.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was preferred by 9 per cent of those surveyed, followed by Green Party Leader Elizabeth May with 8 per cent.
Maxime Bernier, who left the Conservative Party last year and founded the People’s Party of Canada, has support from 3 per cent of those surveyed, while 2 per cent said they preferred Bloc Quebecois’s Yves-Francois Blanchet.
Methodology
A national random telephone survey of 1,200 Canadians is conducted by Nanos Research throughout the campaign over a three day period. Each evening a new group of 400 eligible voters are interviewed. The daily tracking figures are based on a three-day rolling sample comprised of 1,200 interviews. To update the tracking a new day of interviewing is added and the oldest day dropped. The margin of error for a survey of 1,200 respondents is ±2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
The respondent sample is stratified geographically and by gender. The data may be weighted by age according to data from the 2016 Canadian Census administered by Statistics Canada. Percentages reported may not add up to 100 due to rounding.
