New HD Poll: 1% Liberal Lead

Well, that didn't take long.

The Globe and Mail, via the Canadian Press, is reporting on a new Harris-Decima poll that more or less erases the Ipsos-Reid madness of the last few days:

Liberals - 32%
Conservatives - 31%
New Democrats - 16%
Greens - 11%
Bloc Quebecois - 9%

As someone who keeps an eye on every poll, this looks more accurate. It shows the Liberals and Conservatives in a tie and has a relatively strong NDP result. That has been the story for the past few weeks, and with more than 2,000 respondents the margin of error is lower. However, the poll was taken between August 13 and August 23 - straddling the Ipsos-Reid poll and encompassing several polling days both after and before it. Could it be that Ipsos-Reid was merely polling at a particularly bad time for the Liberals? Since more than half of the Harris-Decima poll was taken during and after the Ipsos-Reid poll, we should see a much bigger Conservative number if the IR poll is to be considered to have discovered a new trend.

Harris-Decima is the least favourable pollster when it comes to the Conservatives, but they also haven't been too friendly to the Liberals. The disparity isn't very large, so taking this into account we still end up with a Liberal/Conservative tie.

We don't have any of the details yet, and Harris-Decima is one of the slower pollsters when it comes to posting their detailed data, but I'm pretty sure we can use this to consider the IR poll as a complete outlier.

More to come as more information becomes available.