Summertime and government living is easy? Not necessarily

The summer recess is an opportunity for a government to escape the opposition heckles and questions from the parliamentary press gallery. It is a time for the governing party to lick its wounds and improve its polling numbers in anticipation of the return to the House of Commons in the fall. But while conventional wisdom has it that summers are good for governments, the last three decades of polling indicates otherwise.

You can read the rest of the article on The Globe and Mail website here.

On an unrelated note, I have finished the Quebec projection model and have updated it to incorporate the latest tweaking from the lessons of the 2011 federal campaign. When the next Léger Marketing or CROP poll is released I'll go into greater detail, as it does have a few neat little things added to it. Can anyone say François Legault?

Using it on the last Léger poll which had a 30-30 tie between the Liberals and the Parti Québécois, the result is a large Liberal minority. The incumbency advantage and the split of the PQ vote due to the démissionaires is the culprit. The efficiency of the PQ vote - efficient enough to give Lucien Bouchard a majority government in 1998 with fewer votes than Charest - cannot be taken for granted.

I've also updated the federal model with the results of the May election. Though I haven't input the factors, the model is ready to make projections at the federal level on a simple swing basis. Once I complete the five provincial models for this fall, I'll get to work on that. But having the new model means being able to make calls in individual ridings. For instance, with the June polling averages the Bloc Québécois would be able to retain only one seat: Haute-Gaspésie - La Mitis - Matane - Matapédia.