The Janet Brown result is weird, no question. Doubly so because the actual poll isn’t being released, other than as summarized in the Don Braid article. She apparently attributes the difference to “true random” telephone samples vs. online panels, which…. Doesn’t strike me as a particularly plausible explanation.
We won’t know who has this right until May 29th, but one other point is that there are always going to be outliers. Right now either Janet Brown or Abacus are going to look like outliers when all is said and done, unless further data shows some convergence later on.
Interestingly, her numbers are also at odds with Main Street, which has shown slow but reasonably steady tightening in its daily tracker since it released the UCP +7 poll on May 8.
it’s worth considering what Janet Brown is predicting, just from a smell test perspective: she is basically saying that Danielle Smith’s UCP is just as popular as Jason Kenney’s UCP was in 2019. That doesn’t seem even remotely plausible to me, but then I’m not trying to model the electorate—I’m just a person on the internet.
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