Ipsos Reid and Forum Research Polls – June 2012

There are two polls to report on, both conducted a couple weeks ago:

An Ipsos Reid poll (linked here), sampling 1,026 people using an online panel, between June 5 to 11, 2012 had the following results:

BC NDP – 48%
BC Liberals – 29%
BC Conservatives – 16%
BC Greens – 6%
Other – 1% (inferred)

Notably, 20% were undecided, so the following results above were normalized from the approximate 821 people that did give intentions.

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A Forum Research Poll (their link, local copy), sampling 1,014 people using an interactive voice response system, on June 12, 2012 had the following results:

BC NDP – 50%
BC Liberals – 20%
BC Conservatives – 19%
BC Greens – 11%
Other – 0%

They also plugged into their opaque election models a seat projection, which was the following:

BC NDP – 78
BC Liberals – 3
BC Conservatives – 2
BC Greens – 0
Other – 2

Using a raw quantitative vote migration model gets a slightly more extreme result (as I elucidated upon in a previous post), but the raw calculus is fairly simple: if any party gets 50% of the vote in a first past the post election, a huge amount of seats are going to go into their direction.

These two polls show a divergence of support for the BC Liberals, and Bernard Schulmann has some analysis of this, most of which I generally agree with. The part I disagree with is the raw logic: it could be the case that both polling firms are wrong. Polling of this nature (pre-election without any general news-driven aspects provincially) will have a lot of noise and accuracy will especially depend on obtaining clean samples for polling.