Majority of UCP Supporters and Albertans Want a New Party Leader: Poll Finds | CBC News


Alberta voters would be more inclined to vote for the United Conservative Party with a new leader, according to a poll released Tuesday.

As Prime Minister Jason Kenney heads into a review of the party’s leadership, nearly 40 percent of adults surveyed said they would be more likely to vote for the UCP in the next election if Kenney is absent.

More than half of people who said they voted for the UCP in the 2019 provincial election said they would be more likely to vote for the UCP under a new leader, according to the new survey.

“Honestly, I was expecting their approval numbers to go up and the race to get tighter, but it’s not,” said Marc Henry, president of public affairs for ThinkHQ, which conducted the online survey of 1,135 Albertans.

The poll suggests the NDP has an edge, with 41 percent saying they would be more likely to vote New Democrats if an election were held today, compared to 30 percent who would be more likely to vote UCP. Much of that NDP support comes from residents of Calgary and Edmonton.

Other recent polls have found a narrower margin of support between the two parties.

Henry says his company’s polling shows that for the past four months, Albertans’ appetite to replace Kenney as party leader has been consistently above 60 percent.

“Oil prices are way up and revenues are way up for the province, and employment is getting better, and the economy is doing better, and there’s a fight brewing with Trudeau, and you know, these are all forces that normally help a prime minister in Alberta,” Henry said.

Two-thirds of Albertans surveyed disapproved of the job Kenney is doing as party leader.

Henry said the poll doesn’t give an idea of ​​how UCP members might vote in the leadership review, but it does paint a picture of how Albertans might react to the result.

Asked for his reaction to the poll, Harrison Fleming, a spokesman for Kenney’s leadership campaign, said in an email that he’s encouraged by the comments he’s hearing from rank-and-file Conservatives and Albertans.

“The Premier looks forward to continuing the good work on Alberta’s economic recovery,” he wrote.

Wildrose finds support

The poll results suggest that Alberta’s Wildrose Independence Party has become a home for conservatives disenchanted with Kenney.

About a tenth of those surveyed said they intended to vote for Wildrose in the next election. Nearly half of those potential Wildrose voters said they would be more likely to vote for the UCP if Kenney was gone.

There are no margins of error for panel-based online surveys, but the margin of error for a comparable survey drawn from a random sample of respondents would be plus or minus 2.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

ThinkHQ’s results echo other recent polls that also found Kenney remains relatively unpopular compared to other provinces’ premiers.

An Angus Reid Institute poll in mid-March found Kenney’s approval rating had risen four percentage points to 30 percent.

A leaked Janet Brown poll last month found the prime minister’s approval rating had risen to 36 percent from a low of 19 percent, but 60 percent still disapproved of his performance.

Brown’s poll also found that the UCP led the NDP by four points in voting intentions, but that 14 percent of respondents did not express a choice.

A Yorkville Strategies telephone survey of 600 Albertans posted last month suggested that 60 percent of UCP supporters wanted to retain Kenney as party leader and 33 percent wanted a new leader, the opposite of the ThinkHQ result.

The Yorkville results suggest that 44 percent of voters would choose a Kenney-led UCP government, and 39 percent would vote for Rachel Notley’s NDP.



Reference-www.cbc.ca

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