i would have actually expected advance voters to support the conservatives in much higher numbers, because they have the highest number of decided & dedicated voters. the average conservative voter made up their mind months or years before the writ dropped. the election isn’t a period of contemplation, for the bulk of them. i would have expected something more like 45%. so, those are actually relatively good numbers for the liberals in the advance polls.

in a sense, polling the advance voters does the same thing that removing very high numbers of undecideds does. when you reduce the sample space to dedicated decideds, the conservatives invariably get the highest numbers.

to put it another way: if the liberals were clearly ahead in the advance polls (remember that there’s margins here…it’s a statistical tie), even by a point beyond the margin, you’d expect them to be on their way to a a huge majority. that would demonstrate endemic apathy in the conservative base, which you expect to dominate advance polls because they’re not deliberating anything. these numbers, as they are, suggest some pretty low levels of enthusiasm for the conservatives in their base. you may see the situation reversed (as it was in the 2014 ontario election); it may be the conservatives that end up with some turnout problems.

i mean, that’s just unusually low for a party that continually polls 75+ in terms of dedicated voter support. what are they waiting for? why *didn’t* they vote in greater numbers in advance polls?

www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2015/10/stalemate-continues