Nick Kouvalis is a Canadian political consultant and strategist. As a Conservative strategist he has worked for Rob Ford, Doug Ford, John Tory and Conservative Premier Christy Clark in BC, He is a principal strategist of Campaign Research a polling firm he co-founded in 2008. Today he released the results of an omnibus poll he conducted for the Toronto star shows extremely high approval ratings for Premier Doug Ford with 66 percent of Ontarians either strongly or somewhat approving of the job he is doing. That contrasts with Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca who could only muster 19 percent on the same scale. 56% of Ontarians were unsure when asked about the Liberal leader. Andrea Horwath scored 8 percent strongly approve and 30 percent somewhat approve. Somewhat surprisingly 30 percent of Ontarians said they were “unsure” on Horwath’s job performance even though she has been party leader for 11 years and has seen the party through three elections.
In terms of voter preference if an election were to be held today the Ford PCs stood at 37 percent, the Del Duca Liberals at 23 percent, the Horwath NDP at 16 and the Green Party at 6 percent. Looking at the Hamilton Niagara Region. The PC stood at 38 percent, The NDP at 24, Liberals at 15 and the Greens at 4 percent leading Kouvalis to predict PC takeaways from the NDP—an assertion challenged by local political observers not affiliated with the NDP.
Respondents were also asked to provide the issues that are most important to them. Interestingly given the current public climate in the wake of several police shootings of visible minorities, only two percent listed defunding police as their number one issue, with six percent listing is as their second issue. The top issue was jobs and the economy with 46 percent rating it number one or two, followed closely by healthcare.
This study was conducted on July 7th to 10th, 2020, among a sample of 1,434 respondents who are residents of Ontario and part of Maru/Blue’s research panel. The study was conducted through online surveys. A probabilistic sample of a similar size would have a margin of error of plus or minus 3%,19 times out of 20
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