2pm, Saturday. The Big Question on everyone’s mind is: How are the Liberal Leadership Candidates Doing after Friday? First, the answer (see COMMENTARY and EXPLANATION below):

FRIDAY’S PROJECTED VS. ACTUAL (# OF DELEGATES)

FRIDAY’S PROJECTED VS. ACTUAL (% OF DELEGATES)

* NOTE: This is not the overall projection, but rather a weighted projection of Friday’s meetings.

COMMENTARY
Overall, our projections are holding up well, with only two small deviations so far. Through Friday, Michael Ignatieff (+24) and Stephane Dion (+21) are doing slightly better than projected, but well within the margin of error of the projections (which we figure is about +/- 5%; example if we project Ignatieff at 26.8%, the estimated range is 25.5% to 28.1%). Joe Volpe (-8), Gerard Kennedy (-5), Martha Hall Findlay (-5) and Bob Rae (-1) are performing about as projected. The only two deviations are Ken Dryden (-36) who is doing worse than projected, and Undeclared delegates (+12) who are doing better than projected.

We would estimate that Ignatieff has performed slightly better than projected among youth delegates, but not significantly better. Dion appears to have performed slightly better than projected in Atlantic Canada, but again not significantly better. Ken Dryden has done worse than expected in Atlantic Canada. All-in-all, however, day one appears to largely confirm our overall projections. Stay tuned for an update after Saturday’s results.

EXPLANATION OF HOW WE CALCULATED THE FRIDAY COMPARISON
It is misleading to simply compare the overall tally to our overall predictions, since Friday’s meetings are heavily weighted towards club meetings, rather than riding meetings.

By our calculations — that is, looking at the meeting times as provided by the Liberal Party — there should have been 110 meetings (24%) on Friday (note that only 96 have reported), 142 (31%) on Saturday, 130 (28%) on Sunday, and 71 (15%) mail-in, for a total of 465 meetings.

Of the 110 Friday meetings, 56 (51%) are club meetings (30 youth, 23 women, 1 senior). So about half of Friday’s meetings were clubs, as compared to their overall weight of one-third (there are 308 riding meetings and 157 club meetings).

So, to guage how the Liberal leadership candidates are doing after Friday, we will compare the results with our projections for the riding, youth, women and seniors according to the actual number of meetings that took place on Friday. We do this by weighting our regional riding projections according to the share of meetings that have taken place so far:

Ontario — 12 of 106 = 11%
Quebec — 17 of 75 = 22%
B.C. — 8 of 36 = 22%
Prairies — 5 of 56 = 8%
Atlantic — 14 of 35 = 40%
Youth — 30 of 55 = 55%
Seniors — 1 of 7 = 14%
Women — 23 of 82 = 28%
Aboriginal — 0 of 12 = 0%

To arrive at the above comparison, we took our regional riding and club projections, pro-rated them to the share of meetings complete as indicated above, and added the totals.