My Liberal buddy Scott Tribe is gleeful about today's EKOS poll, which confirms the Decima poll earlier this week and makes the August 24 Ipsos-Reid poll look more and more like an outlier.
Bottom line: the two parties are statistically neck-and-neck, although the Tories lead slightly in today's poll results.
Scott wants me to write a "retraction" of my earlier post on the matter, but for the life of me I can't see anything in what I wrote there that needs retracting.
Fact: the new Leader bounce is long gone, if it ever existed. Ignatieff stands for everything and nothing: he's a political cipher.
Fact: the Tories have shaken the confidence of a lot of Canadians this summer with their high-profile foreign affairs shenanigans, so some support in the penumbra might well be expected to have bled to the Liberals by default.
Fact: to be merely at a dead heat with the tawdry Tories after three awful years is clear evidence of failure. It most assuredly is nothing to crow about.
Fact: EI reform is not a key voter issue.
Fact: the prospects of a Fall election are fading very, very quickly. In fact I'm going to go out on a limb here--won't happen.
UPDATE: (August 28) Scott, you there? Impolitical? I'm having another Eric Cartman moment. :)
