Mulcair drops in Nanos 'Best PM' tally

The latest weekly sounding from Nanos Research on who Canadians prefer for prime minister has low numbers for Tom Mulcair — the lowest on record for the NDP leader.

Nanos's poll is a four-week rolling sample, so there is a lot of overlap from one week to the next. But the chart below breaks down Nanos's polling into independent samples. Since the election, there have been three. Note that the first result for Rona Ambrose includes some responses for Stephen Harper.

None of the movement from poll-to-poll is outside the margin of error, so too much should not be made of these numbers until a more long-term trend emerges. But the difference for Mulcair between the first post-election poll and the most recent, where he registers 10.3%, is just 0.1 point less than the margin of error for these two samples.

Justin Trudeau's numbers in these independent samples are heading in a positive direction, and he leads with 53.2%.

Ambrose follows him with 13.2%, while Elizabeth May and Rhéal Fortin were at 4.2% and 1.1%, respectively.

As noted in Nanos's release last week, Trudeau's biggest competition is the undecided. They are at 18% in the last poll. If we remove the undecideds, Trudeau leads with 65%, followed by Ambrose at 16% and Mulcair at 13%.

On another topic entirely, and quite different from my usual beat, I took a deep dive into the numbers surrounding our mission in the Middle East against ISIS.

And on another unrelated topic, you'll find below the latest provincial polling averages, updated through to December 2015.

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