If you're happy and you know it (II)

Another day, another poll. This time, it’s one of Angus Reid’s periodic look-sees at how the Premiers are faring.


It probably won’t get the Ministry of Twitter treatment.

It’s an interesting little exercise to take the Angus Reid figures on Approve/Disapprove of the premier’s performance, and mash them up with CRA’s satisfaction-with-government score and Environics’ right-track/wrong-track measure.

Bearing in mind the different questions and pollster methodologies, here is the long-term trend of net satisfied/approve/right-track figures. That is, the percentage of respondents who are happy with the government/premier of the day, minus those who are not. (If you are the subject of the poll, you like to be well into the positive territory.)

CRA satisfaction-with-government figures are in saturated colours; Angus Reid Approve/Disapprove and Environics “track” results are in pale ones. (Click to enlarge)

And while the Premier’s personal performance seems to be weighing more heavily than CRA’s satisfaction-with-government question, the trend line for all polls is by now unmistakable. The incumbent PC government and Premier are now arriving into the same dangerous public-opinion territory that the Grimes government was in between 2001 and 2003.

[N.B.: Chart methodology differs slightly from the July iteration of the same them, in that this chart shows the net score among decided respondents only. Undecided/don’t know responses are excluded from the calculation. Also, note that the horizontal axis is variable in time-scale.]