Ford PCs poll comfortably as legislature begins summer

As the spring session draws to a close at Queen’s Park, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives appear to be pretty much Ontarians’ favorite choice to lead the province, according to a new public opinion poll.

The survey, conducted by Pallas Data for Trillium, shows Bonnie Crombie’s Liberals trailing the PCs as the preferred choice of the province’s second most likely voter. They are closely followed by Marit Stiles’ New Democrats and Mike Schreiner’s Green Party, who are a distant fourth.

Pallas Data’s automated telephone poll on June 4 was of 1,136 eligible voters. The result was a sample with a margin of error of 2.9% at the 95% confidence level.

Among potential voters who said they had either decided or were inclined to vote for a party, 39.4% said they would vote PC if an election were held right now. Another 26.5% indicated they would vote Liberal, while 22.6% said they would vote NDP, 8.3% said they would vote for the Greens and 3.2% said they would choose a another party.

If the poll’s results were replicated in an election, the result would be another comfortable majority government for Ford’s PCs, according to Joseph Angolano, founder and CEO of Pallas Data.

Ford’s first two PC majority terms came from elections which they won with 40.5 and 40.8% of the vote respectively.

The Pallas Data poll of potential voters found the PCs favored in five out of six regions, excluding only the Hamilton-Niagara corridor. It also showed that the Liberals are voters’ preference ahead of or effectively equal to the NDP in every region. Regional findings and other smaller subsets are subject to larger margins of error due to smaller sample sizes.

“I think (the PCs) are in the position they’re in because they’ve done a great job of identifying who their base is,” Angolano said. “They know that traditionally they don’t go below a certain level,” he added, noting that the PCs had not won less than 30 percent of the vote in a general election since 1990.

“There’s also a strong personal brand for Doug Ford and he’s appealing to that base … and as long as (the PCs) can make those voters happy, they’re going to win and there’s not much that the NDP or the liberals can do them. do it,” Angolano said.

Two-thirds of respondents who said they would vote PC said that so far in 2024 the Ford government was doing either a “very good” job (28%) or a “somewhat good” job (38%). percent indicated they felt the Ford government was doing a “neither good nor bad” job, while only 14 percent said they felt it was doing a “somewhat bad” (seven percent) or “very bad” job (seven percent). job this year.

Only a small proportion (14 percent) of respondents who identified themselves as likely to vote for the PCs said they would be less inclined if the election was called before June 6, 2026, the set date. Ford could make an early call and has signaled in recent weeks that the idea is at least in play. However, he ruled out calling an election this summer or fall in a radio interview last week.

The Pallas Data survey also sought to assess whether party voters were most likely to vote strategically. NDP-leaning voters were the most likely (43.9 percent) to say they would vote for another party to prevent the PCs from winning, followed by those who favored the Liberals (31.6 percent ), then the respondents who favored the greens (21.6 percent). . Most PC-leaning respondents (58.3 percent) chose an option suggesting their vote was firmly planted, while 31.8 percent chose an option presented to them indicating they were in favor to Ford’s party because they didn’t like the others.

Survey respondents were also asked about the PCs’ attack ads on Crombie, who was elected leader of the Ontario Liberal Party last December. The ads, which the PC Party paid to run during widely watched television shows such as NHL playoff games, portray Crombie as an elitist who would raise taxes.

There were 36.2% of respondents to the June 4 Pallas Data survey who said they had seen the attack ads. The ads seem to be working as PC Party intended so far, according to responses from those who remembered seeing them, as 22.3% said the ads made their opinion of Crombie worse, while 13.8 % said it improved their opinion of her. Of the rest, 58.8 percent said their opinion of the Liberal leader was unchanged by the ads, and five percent said they weren’t sure.

Of the PC-leaning respondents who recalled the attack ads, 51.8% said their opinion of Crombie worsened after seeing them.

“If this was a play (by the PCs) to get Bonnie Crombie out of the way to make sure those voters don’t go to the Liberals, then mission accomplished,” Angolano said.