An encouraging poll result in Guelph, but the race is far from over.

Byelections normally don’t get polled, so there’s been some question as to how the races in these 3 byelections have been developing. I noted a column today from Thomas Walkom in the Star where he said Guelph was one of those ridings that theoretically, the Conservatives should be able to win because of its demographics and economic situation. So, this first poll I’ve seen on the Guelph byelection if accurate will be a bit of a downer for the Cons. in this riding. On the other hand, its very encouraging news for the Liberals and Frank Valeriote’s campaign in Guelph:

Frank Valeriote looks to become the next Member of Parliament for Guelph, based on the most recent polls completed by KlrVu Research. Over thirty six percent of voters have indicated their support for the Liberal candidate, and he retains a 10-percentage point lead over nearest competitor Gloria Kovach of the Conservatives who has 26.35% of the voters polled…”The biggest surprise in this poll is the dramatic fashion in which the Green Party has overtaken the NDP in just two and half years. The Greens came in at 19.2%, up 11 percent from their 2006 tally, whereas the NDP have dropped from 22% to 17.7% during the same period. Also interesting, it seems the Green support is coming from all of the parties, not just the NDP.” Stated Bruinooge.

Take a look at the polling sample size this company did:

This poll was completed in two rounds on July 27th and August 13th, sampling over 3396 random residents of the Guelph constituency representing nearly nine percent of all households with a 95% confidence level and a margin of error of 2%.

That’s a massive sample size - as big as a national sample size. If true, that is a pretty good lead for Frank Valeriote and the Liberals with a couple of weeks to go.

Now, my thoughts on this poll: It’s an unknown polling company, at least to me, so folks need to be careful not take this poll as Gospel. You’ll also note that their methodology that they used is automated touch-tone polling. Some people have issues with this, but a couple of pollsters in the US are using this - such as SurveyUSA - and their polling results have been pretty accurate, so I’m not one to discount that methodology.

The bottom line however is that the race isn’t over - it’s far from over - and my suggestion to the Liberal team is to continue to work on the ground as if you’re 10 points down, not 10 points up.

UPDATE@ 1:00pm: It’s been pointed out in comments that this polling company is the same firm that was used by pro-life groups a month or so back to try and justify that a majority of Canadians opposed Henry Morgentaler’s receiving the Order of Canada, which was questionable to say the least, since only 7000+ respondents out of 157,115 called actually responded to this poll question. So with that new information, one could take this poll with a massively big grain of salt, since we have no idea out of the 3400 households that this polling company called how many of those actually bothered to respond to the poll without hanging up when they heard what it was (It doesn’t say at the news release how many did actually answer the questions).

The other angle would be that one could say that despite questions of the pollster’s objectivity and apparent strong ties to the Conservatives, it’s still a pretty bad result for the Conservatives in Guelph if a possibly partisan pollster still has them trailing by 10%.

UPDATE 2@3:57pm: For a somewhat different take, check out Blogging a Dead Horse, who charges this is a bogus poll, but he feels that it was released to attack the NDP with.