Why Kathleen Wynne had a good Sunday

Ontario Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne talks to members of Toronto’s Leaside Lawn Bowling Club on Saturday May 3. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press)
There was much chatter this weekend about a front-page poll in the Toronto Star, suggesting the Progressive Conservatives are leading in overall support, but the Liberals are well-positioned to win back government anyway and the NDP is a distant third.
There are good reasons to take that story with an enormous grain of salt. The methods of Forum Research, notably its ability to achieve representative samples, have been widely questioned in the past couple of years. And seat distribution models, based on reaching fewer than 20 people in any given riding, are a rather inexact science no matter who’s doing them.
That said, regardless of whether it’s accurate, the attention given to that poll was one of the few potentially impactful moments of the campaign’s first weekend.
The vast majority of people who read the story or saw the headline aren’t going to obsess over the methodology; they’re just going to come away with the impression it’s a close race between Kathleen Wynne and Tim Hudak, with Andrea Horwath an afterthought. Considering that (as explained in my column today) creating exactly that impression among left-of-centre voters is the Liberals’ biggest strategic imperative in the campaign’s first leg, that party couldn’t have had a much better Sunday.