One last horse-race number from Ontario’s election campaign
As you probably know if you spent much time around here during Ontario’s election campaign, we put a fair amount of time and effort into trying to understand the perspectives of voters.
The idea of the Listening Post project that Innovative Research Group did for us was to get beyond the usual horse-race polling that tends to dominate coverage, and get a better grasp on why people would vote the way they did. So we opted not to report the horse-race numbers from this research at all – because that really wasn’t the point, and we didn’t want those numbers to overshadow the more in-depth stuff, and because the idea was to produce information that would hold up regardless of who won.
That said, as we continue to roll out a bit more of the numbers-behind-the-numbers this week, we can have a little extra confidence in this research. Because if we had reported the horse-race figures that Innovative Research showed us the day before the election, that company would be getting to do a little crowing about now.
Here, for the record, are the final decided-voter numbers based on a weighted sample of 526 Listening Post respondents who participated in an online panel between June 8 and June 10. Other than some modest upward movement by the NDP in the campaign’s final days, these were fairly consistent with what Innovative Research saw (often with larger samples) through the campaign’s final weeks – a strong Liberal lead over a PC Party with a lower share of the popular vote than most other polls were suggesting.
Decided-voter numbers
Based on a weighted sample of 526 Listening Post respondents.
SOURCE: Innovative Research Group
And here, in case you don’t have such things committed to memory, is what popular vote turned out to be once the ballots had been counted on June 12.
Popular vote
Again, the horse race really wasn’t the point here. But if nothing else, it’s nice to know that when it came to voting intentions, the people who were helping us get a better read on the electorate were apparently pretty reflective of that electorate at large.