The latest EKOS poll (June 25 2009) has some interesting general comments, and some gender specific numbers. The news for Ignatieff and our party is a mixed bag, with Ignatieff's negatives now rising, and his popularity showing a definite drop from the January poll. The poll also shows that Harper's position is improving:
"At the same time, the Conservatives are benefitting from rising optimism about the economy among some Canadians – those affected more directly by the economic news or stock and real estate markets than by the labour market, which continues to deteriorate.
"The Liberals may well recover from this short-term political setback,” said EKOS President Frank Graves. “At least that has been the pattern of the last six months when purely political events have rocked Canadians’ voting intentions.”
“More hopeful for the Conservatives and worrisome for the Liberals is the rising optimism on the economy, which is clearly behind some of the movement back to the Conservatives from the Liberals in recent weeks. This might have the makings of a more enduring trend.”
The principal movement in this most recent poll took place in Ontario. For several months the Liberals have enjoyed an advantage in the province, often reaching into the double-digits. Now, they are neck-and-neck with the Conservatives in Canada’s largest province.
“The Liberals need Ontario to win an election,” Graves said. “They were gaining ground there, but now that advantage has disappeared.""
The personal popularity shows Harper regaining approval at a fast clip, with Ignatieff sinking into negative territory:
"Michael Ignatieff’s personal approval rating also took a substantial dip last week. Earlier in the year, while many Canadians said they did not yet know him, those who did have an opinion of the Liberal leader approved of the job he was doing by a substantial margin. By the beginning of this month, more people were familiar with him, and his approval rating was essentially neutral.
Now, in this most recent poll, he has slumped into net-negative territory. As with the party’s fortunes more generally, the most wounding change was in Ontario.
“There could be a couple of factors at play here,” said Graves. “It may be that the Tory ad campaign aimed at Ignatieff is finally starting to have a corrosive effect on his reputation. At the same time, Ignatieff was the public face of the Liberal brinksmanship last week, and that may have affected his personal reputation as well as the party’s.”
“Ignatieff’s negatives are not as serious as Stephen Harper’s, but the prime minister has been heading in the right direction in recent weeks, while Ignatieff’s numbers have been heading south. Canadians may not have wanted an election this summer, but they are certainly going to have a campaign nonetheless, as all the parties – and all the leaders – try to move these numbers.”"
Far and Wide has some other interesting conclusions from this EKOS poll.
Also interesting is the gender gap in support for both Harper and Ignatieff.
Both Harper and Ignatieff have more males expressing approval of them than females (for Harper, 39% of males approve and 29% of females, a gender approval gap of 10%; for Ignatieff, 37% of males approve, and 27% of females approve, with the same gender approval gap of 10%).
As for Harper, a whopping 47% of males disapprove of his performance, compared to 40% for Ignatieff (a difference of 7%).
Among females, the gender disapproval gap is 12%, with 46% disapproving of Harper and only 34% of Ignatieff.
There is hope for Ignatieff, in that the poll results show a higher proportion of DK/NR (Don't Know/No Response) for him than for Harper. We can take the DK/NR results as a rough measure of those who have not decided about Ignatieff yet – a kind of 'jury is still out' group. The positive feature is that this DK/NR group probably has many in it who just have not formed a firm opinion about Ignatieff, and who could be persuaded to approve of him. Their absence of an opinion could be because he is still unknown to many Canadians, and because there is not much publicly available information to allow voters to judge him as a politician, supporting specific policies directly applicable to Canada.
Not surprisingly, given his shelf life as an active politician in Canada, far more Canadians have firmer views about Harper: only 14% of males fall into the DK/NR group, and 26% of females.
For Ignatieff, the results are 23% males (almost twice that of Harper), and a sizeable 40% of females.
I could not find any January EKOS analysis of the gender approval and disapproval results, but did find the January EKOS results of the approval of the Liberal-NDP Coalition government (rather than a Harper government) interesting: 50% preferred the Coalition in January (the very clever and very dishonest Tory framing launched late in 2008 had died down a bit by then), and only 43% preferred a continued Harper government. The approval of the Coalition government was 80% amongst Liberal respondents, 86% NDP, 85% Bloc and 70% Greens).
