Friday, August 4, 2023 - The first thing I saw Thursday morning, about 15 minutes after it was posted, was a tweet from Mainstreet Research. “Our latest Manitoba polling.”
The results showed in the inaugural post were surprising, and not just to the tall foreheads at the mainstream outlets who spend hours crafting assaults on anything Blue. I sent the tweet to a highly connected PC campaign veteran, showing the governing party with a 4-point lead among decided voters in a poll of about 600 participants, with the NDP down to 38%. “Holy Sh#@” was the response. Not even Tory insiders expected such news of a turnaround on the eve of the election blackout on announcements.
Surveys by other pollsters in the last few years showed a steady slide for the NDP, with support for Wab Kinew sliding from 53% to a dead heat in June. For noting in real time this was happening, some of us were labelled “lucky pundits”.
While it’s not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison because of survey size, weighting and methodology, this result lends more evidence that the NDP has failed to gain ground no matter what it has tossed at Heather Stefanson. In fact, as a CBC reporter opined, “Weeks to go before the formal start of Manitoba's election campaign, the opposition New Democrats are sending mixed signals about their readiness to pounce upon the governing Progressive Conservatives.”
The most recent example was “Three audits itemizing genuine failures by the PCs were relegated to a single media event held after most of the reporting about the audits was complete.”
-Marty Gold
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