With the 2014 Vancouver civic election finally heating up, the internal polling conducted for the two major mainstream parties seeking office in the Vancouver municipal election — Bob Penner, Stratcom founder, president, CEO, and former employer of Gregor Robertson’s Chief of Staff, Mike Magee, for Vision Vancouver; and Maple Leaf Strategies’ partner and pollster Dimitri Pantazopoulos (who conducted last year’s spot on election polling for the provincial Liberals), and currently Non-Partisan Association lead pollster — released resonant internal polling results on the Vancouver Mayoral race to their anxious political masters, late last week.
Whereas the polling conducted for newspapers and the broadcast media — done on the cheap, or for free (in exchange for the marketing advantage to the pollster), and utterly meaningless for purposes other than their entertainment value — generally results in highly inaccurate polling data — not least because of the small sample size — the much larger, poll-by-poll sample conducted for the major political parties, with extrapolated numbers that take into account the ‘most likely to vote‘ segment of the voting populace, produces as near to accurate polling results as is possible.
So, you want to know: what are the Vancouver mayoral race insider party polling results, with a sample size for each of Vision Vancouver and the NPA in excess of 2,000 most likely to vote Vancouver residents?
The answer …
Vision Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson, the Non-Partisan Association’s Kirk LaPointe, and COPE’s Meena Wong are in a statistical dead heat.
In the three weeks following the entry of the Coalition of Progressive Electors’ mayoral candidate into the mayoral race, Gregor Robertson’s approval / intent-to-vote rating has dropped a calamitous 17 points! Statistical dead heat polling results: 32%, COPE’s Meena Wong / 34%, the NPA’s Kirk LaPointe / and 32%, Vision Vancouver’s Gregor Robertson.
The Non-Partisan Association is both sanguine, and over-the-moon about the results. Sanguine, because as VanRamblings was told, “Kirk has room to grow”, and over-the-moon because Meena Wong has knocked our city’s sitting Mayor off his previously-thought-to-be unassailable perch. “This will be a horse race,” say NPA insiders. “We’re confident that in the final weeks of the campaign Kirk LaPointe, as he becomes better known to the electorate, will pull well ahead of our deeply unpopular incumbent mayor.”
Vision Vancouver apparatchiks with whom VanRamblings spoke simply yawned at the polling results, recalling how in 2011’s civic election Vision Vancouver was in tough in the polling, and seemingly on their way to defeat. The final five days of the 2011 campaign — which witnessed a saturation $657,000 (and mightily effective) television ad campaign that ran on all local TV station newscasts, morning, noon, early evening and late night, turned the tide for Vision Vancouver, wiping out previously dire internal polling results, propelling the incumbent majority party to victory.
Emerging as perhaps the biggest surprise in the 2014 Vancouver civic election: COPE’s Lazarus-like restoration to political relevancy. Who’da thunk that the folks currently directing the COPE election machine, and the members of COPE’s Left Front, have a taste for retail politics — which is to say, sophisticated ground game, grassroots, mass appeal politics designed to appeal to both the broadest constituency of voters, as well as to the diverse communities that comprise the Vancouver in which we live?
At a time when many on the left (not to mention, almost all members of Vancouver’s political class) were writing off COPE’s chances to make an impact in the 2014 Vancouver municipal election campaign, with the energizing emergence of Meena Wong on the Vancouver municipal scene — honestly, a first-rate candidate for Mayor, who’s been setting the election issue agenda this past three weeks — and an exceedingly strong, high profile community activist COPE Council slate, representing both the largest and the strongest COPE Council slate in a generation, make no mistake: COPE is now a factor in the 2014 Vancouver municipal election.
