United Conservative Party on track to win big in Alberta, says poll
One and done. With many voters still pessimistic about the economy, Albertans look set to kick out NDP
A year away from Alberta's next provincial election, voters seem intent on reverting to their long history of electing conservative governments.
Fifty-three per cent of decided voters, according to the survey of 1,200 Albertans, would vote for the United Conservative Party (UCP) led by former federal Conservative cabinet minister Jason Kenney. And this puts the party on course to a substantial victory.
"This kind of lead for the UCP would translate into an overwhelming majority of seats," said Calgary-based pollster Janet Brown, who conducted the poll for CBC News.
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A note on method
The response rate to CBC's poll was a whopping 20.8 percent. In this age of cellphones — and people who don't answer calls from unknown numbers — most live-operator telephone surveys average a response rate of 10 percent.
The 1,200 people who responded to the poll were randomly contacted by an interviewer working for Edmonton-based Trend Research. People were not contacted using Interactive Voice Response (IVR) computer technology, commonly known as robocalls. People who participated in the poll spoke to a real human. They were given the option of answering the survey over telephone at that time, answering over the telephone at a more convenient time, or receiving a link and answering the survey online.
And people really took their time thoughtfully answering our questions — on average 16 minutes!
Melanee Thomas, who teaches political science research methods at the University of Calgary, acted as an advisor for this study.
"Deeply skeptical" of many polls in the news media, Thomas called CBC's mixed-method political study rigorous.
"Because I think most of the polls that people get access to are crap," said Thomas, "I wanted to be a part of something where we actually did it right so that we could actually show how it's suppose to be done properly — but also give people real, reliable information that they can use to interpret politics right now."
Source:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgar...tion-1.4636786