PCs open double-digit lead over Liberals in Ipsos poll

With less than three months to go before the Ontario vote, Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives hold a double-digit lead over the governing Liberals, with solid support among older voters living outside of Toronto and a competitive race between the two parties in and around the city.

The latest poll from Ipsos-Reid pegs PC support at 42 per cent, well ahead of the Liberals’ 31 per cent. The New Democrats, with 22 per cent, trail in third.

You can read the rest of the article on The Huffington Post Canada website.

The standing Ontario projection has been updated with the results of this Ipsos-Reid poll only. As you can see, the Progressive Conservatives are still on track for a majority but the Liberals are no longer relegated to third spot. But with a margin of only six seats separating the Liberals from the New Democrats, the Official Opposition spot is still up for grabs.

The poll tracker at the bottom of the page has also been updated, as has the polling trends chart in the right-hand column

The Ontario model is coming along nicely, I just have to input the 'factors' into it and it will be ready to go. Shortly after that, ThreeHundredEight will be maintaining a running projection using an aggregate of all available polls.

I'm not sure what to do about individual riding projections, however. I was not very pleased that they were reported as news during the federal election campaign. I could just present which party is projected to win each riding or give only regional breakdowns. Or, are the individual riding projections useful and interesting to you readers and worth presenting in full?

I'm also trying to settle on how best to report the regional breakdown of Ontario's seats. Currently, I'm working with four regions: Ottawa and eastern Ontario (14 seats), northern Ontario (11 seats), southwestern and central Ontario (42 seats), and the GTA (40 seats). There doesn't seem to be any consensus on how seats should be broken down, especially since the "regions" of Ontario aren't very well defined, unlike Quebec. This, too, I open up to my readers for comment.