New engine, new projection

The much vaunted new engine is finished a day early! All that’s left to do is individual riding tweaks for places where things happened in 2008 that are unique (IE strong independent candidates who are not running again, the Elizabeth May situation, etc) I’ve put a poll average of all the 2009 polls into the engine and it popped out some results. I do note that the poll average was without weighting (we prefer a minimum of 5 polls, we only had 4 to work with in most provinces) and that due to the differences in reporting (“West”, Vs BC and Alberta and the central Prairies) we had to try to break down certain polls and that could be problematic. The same is true for both central Prairie provinces and all 4 Atlantic provinces, part of the tweaking that will be done will fix these issues. Regardless, here is our projection:

TR
C-1
L-1
N-1

BC
C-16
N-11
L-9

AB
C-27
N-1

SK
C-12
L-1
N-1

MB
C-7
N-4
L-3

ON
C-46
L-53
N-7

QC
B-42
L-24
C-9

NB
L-5
C-4
N-1

NS
L-6
N-3
C-2

PE
L-3
C-1

NL
L-6
N-1

TOTALS
C-125
L-111
B-42
N-30

Some questions. Why are the Liberals so strong? Partly this is due to some of the weighting issues I mentioned earlier, but more importantly, the Liberal vote is very efficient at these levels. The Tories and Liberals are tied in Ontario, yet the Liberals have a 7 seat edge here, while hundreds of thousands of Tory votes are wasted in rural Alberta and Saskatchewan. The NDP also appears to be strong, but much of this strength is in BC and Manitoba, which is more likely due to the small sample size and weighting difficulties, this will likely disappear as we tweak the system.