Riffing on the SES "best prime minister" data

I already linked to Accidental Deliberations' excellent post over at the update on my last post, but I wanted to single one part out for special attention:

[The Greens deciding not to run a candidate against Dion] would be a bizarre choice at the best of times, but it's all the more so given the party's current supporters' actual preference among possible PMs.

That's right: as the lone party leader who already holds the dubious honour of being her own party's supporters' second choice for PM, May is throwing her support to their fourth choice (or sixth if one counts "none of the above" and "unsure") in an attempt to stop their first choice. Which only seems likely to alienate both a good chunk of current Green supporters, and anybody who might otherwise have flipped from supporting the Cons.

More of a visual person? Well, the poll AD points to summarizes Greens' first choice for prime minister as the following:


Harper in first place, May in second, Layton in third, and Dion in fourth. That's a terribly amusing statistic. Kind of hilarious, really.

Let's not stop there, though! While the data sets for the other parties aren't quite so funny, they're still pretty interesting. Here, for example, is the Liberals' chart:



And here's the Conservatives':



And here's the NDP's:



And here's the Bloc's:



And most of interest to all the parties trying to sway new voters, the undecideds:



Some fun facts about the data:

• An awful lot of Canadians are planning to vote for parties other than the party with the leader they'd most like to see as PM.
• The only party leaders to have more than 50% support for PM by their own parties are Harper and Duceppe.
• More than a quarter of Liberal voters prefer Harper to Dion.
• The party least likely to think Harper would make the best prime minister is the NDP. And yet even that number is greater than the number of NDP voters who would pick Dion as their first choice.
• Apart from partisan Greens, the most likely party to name May as best PM is the NDP.
• Of all the parties' supporters, Green voters are most likely to say "none of the above" as their first choice.
• The undecideds' first choice for PM is Harper, even over "unsure."
• A number greater than zero of all of the major parties' voters thinks the best prime minister of Canada would be Gilles Duceppe.

What I'm really curious about is people's second choices for PM. Too bad that question wasn't included.