Saturday, September 23, 2006

September opinion poll

My previous post on August opinion poll attracted some interesting comments from a professional survey statistician. Briefly, 9.5% in an opinion poll which polls 1000 people corresponds to a confidence interval [7.7%, 11.3%]. As a result, 1.3% change in Jaunais Laiks rating (from 10.8% in July to 9.5% in August) is not statistically significant to make any conclusions, although 2.2% drop from June to August might have been significant enough.

Meanwhile, Latvijas Fakti have released their September poll. Jaunais Laiks has dropped a little bit more, which confirms that the drop in August poll was not a statistical error. The numbers are:
Tautas Partija 13.3% (+3.5%)
ZZS 12.1% (+0.6%)
PCTVL 9.2% (-1.2%)
Jaunais Laiks 9.2% (-0.3%)
LPP/LC 6.3% (+1.2%)
TB/LNNK 5.8% (-0.8%)
Saskanas Centrs 5.7% (+1.0%)
Social Democrats 3.3% (-0.5%)

Projected seats in the parliament:
Tautas Partija 22 (+6)
ZZS 20 (+1)
PCTVL 15 (-2)
Jaunais Laiks 15 (unchanged)
LPP/LC 10 (+2)
TB/LNNK 9 (-2)
Saskanas Centrs 9 (+1)
Social Democrats 0 (-6)

The change is compared to August poll.

For the first time, the current minority government (TP+ZZS+LPP/LC) is projected to win more than a half of seats (52 out of 100), contrary to the Eastern European trend of voting out the government at every election. But I still think that "let's vote this corrupt government out" mood is going to prevail, once again. But who is going to benefit from it? Jaunais Laiks is no longer the anti-corruption outsider party and Social Democrats have their share of scandals from 2001-2005 Riga city government. Senior Citizen Party? They are still at 1.4% in the opinion poll but who knows...

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