Nenshi ahead of Smith in mayoral contest: Asking Canadians poll

After mayoral candidate Bill Smith blasted the Green Line LRT as city hall’s biggest boondoggle, a notfor-profit group that’s long championed the transit line secured an online pollster to quiz Calgarians on the project and the tight mayoral race.

The results are strikingly different than other recent polls, with pundits stating the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Incumbent mayor Naheed Nenshi is 15 points ahead of his main rival Smith, a businessman and lawyer, according to the poll conducted by the online data collection firm Asking Canadians.

Nenshi has 41 per cent support and Smith garnered 26 per cent support in the poll, while 28 per cent of respondents said they don’t know which mayoral candidate they intend to vote for on Oct. 16.

Longtime councillor Andre Chabot garnered three per cent support in the poll and all other candidates combined had two per cent backing in the survey of 1,004 people conducted from Oct. 7 to 10.

“As the poll results came in, the opinion of Calgarians in terms of who they wanted to vote for, for mayor, differed quite significantly from some of the other polls we saw last week,” said LRT on the Green president Jeff Binks.

Binks was referencing two recent Mainstreet Research/Postmedia telephone polls for the Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun, both of which were criticized by pundits and Nenshi’s team.

The first interactive voice response poll put Smith nine points in front of Nenshi, and the most recent, conducted on Oct. 3 and 4, put Smith at 48 per cent support, 17 points ahead of the incumbent mayor.

Trying to explain how Smith could go from a 17-point lead to 15 points behind Nenshi, Binks attributed some of the swing between the polls to the fact more Calgarians have become aware of the candidates’ stances on the Green Line LRT, in the wake of Smith’s comments last week.

Independent pollster and political analyst Janet Brown said while the Green Line conversation could have impacted voter behaviour, such a massive swing is simply unheard of.

“I’ve never seen public opinion change to that degree,” she said.

Brown said so-called robo-polls, the method used by Mainstreet, attract a completely different respondent than an online panel like the one used by Asking Canadians.

“You’re comparing two different methodologies, two different sampling frames,” she said.

The Asking Canadians poll comes after Smith pledged last week to re-evaluate the 46-kilometre transit line that will one day stretch from 160th Avenue N. to Seton in the deep south.

Nenshi criticized Smith’s position as “remarkably, breathtakingly uninformed,” while Alberta’s transportation and infrastructure minister said any changes to the project would affect the province’s $1.53-billion funding commitment.

Binks said the conversation spurred his group to check if the transit project is still a priority for Calgarians.

The poll found that 70 per cent of respondents oppose delaying construction of the Green Line and 57 per cent of Calgarians agree that a candidate’s position on the Green Line will impact their vote.

Binks said the group sought out Asking Canadians because their work tends to be corporate and marketing in nature, not political.

“We liked the fact they didn’t have any skin in the game,” he said.

The Asking Canadians poll used a representative but non-random sample, therefore margin of error is not applicable. The firm says a probability sample of the same size is considered accurate to within 3.1 percentage points at a 95-percent confidence interval.