François Legault scores highest among leaders in Vote Compass survey
Overall, though, everyone has room for improvement as they head into their first debate
A new survey suggests the Coalition Avenir Québec's François Legault is slightly more popular with voters than his rivals, but all of them have considerable room for improvement as they head into the first televised debate.
In response to the question, "What is your general appreciation of party leaders?", Legault scored the highest, followed by Parti Québécois Leader Jean-François Lisée and the two co-spokespeople for Québec Solidaire.
Liberal Party Leader Philippe Couillard scored the lowest in the survey, which is part of an online questionnaire known as Vote Compass.
Legault was also slightly ahead of the other leaders on the key question of trustworthiness. He scored 4.4 out of 10, 1.2 percentage points more than Couillard.
Charles Breton, director of research at Vox Pop Labs, the company behind Vote Compass, said the overall low approval ratings are not entirely surprising in a survey where users can rate the leaders from 0 to 10.
Breton said low the level of trust, particularly for someone who has already been in office, is consistent with trends seen in other election campaigns.
The findings are based on 125,611 respondents who participated in Vote Compass from Aug. 24 to Sept. 11.
Unlike online opinion polls, respondents to Vote Compass are not pre-selected. Similar to opinion polls, however, the data are a non-random sample from the population and have been weighted in order to approximate a representative sample.
Vote Compass data have been weighted by gender, age, education, language and region to ensure the sample's composition reflects that of the actual population of Quebec, according to census data and other population estimates.
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