12pm, Sunday. So how are the Liberal Leadership Candidates doing after Saturday? First, the answer (see COMMENTARY and EXPLANATION below):

PROJECTED VS. ACTUAL THROUGH SATURDAY (# OF DELEGATES)

PROJECTED VS. ACTUAL THROUGH SATURDAY (% OF DELEGATES)

COMMENTARY
Some of the shifting of support that we anticipated would happen after ballot 1 is already taking place. Clearly, Liberals have come to the (quite correct) conclusion that this is a 4-person race, between Ignatieff, Rae, Dion, and Kennedy. The result is that the top four are running slightly higher than we projected and the bottom four are running slightly lower than we projected. The order of candidates is as we projected, expect that Scott Brison has slipped slightly behind Joe Volpe.

Through Saturday, Michael Ignatieff is running 4% higher than we projected. Rae, Dion and Kennedy are running marginally higher than projected — 1.3%, 0.6% and 1.3% higher, respectively (It should be noted, however, that Kennedy is running higher in Ontario and lower in Quebec than we projected). Ignatieff’s strong performance is clearly coming at the expense of two candidates who we expected would lose support after ballot 1 — Ken Dryden and Scott Brison. Dryden is running at only about half of what we projected, while Brison has garnered about two-thirds of what we projected. One caveat: Dryden is reasonably strong in Northern Ontario and rural BC, where virtually all of the ballots are mail-in, so we might see him get a bump when they are counted.

So while the results so far are good news for Ignatieff, there are signs that should worry his campaign. Specifically, the candidates from which he was most likely to attract 2nd ballot support (Brison and Dryden) have already lost support to Ignatieff. This suggests that while Ignatieff’s first ballot support will be slightly higher than projected, his potential second ballot support is slightly lower. For example, the Rae/Dion/Kennedy vote, which we projected at 50%, is actually running at 53%, while the Ignatieff/everyone else vote, which we projected at 50%, is actually running at 47%. So while, it appears that Ignatieff has 4% more support, the overall “pool” of potential second ballot support is actually 3% less. Most notably, any combination of Rae/Dion, Rae/Kennedy or Dion/Kennedy totals more than Ignatieff.

EXPLANATION OF HOW WE CALCULATED THE COMPARISON
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, 142 (31%) on Saturday, 130 (28%) on Sunday, and 71 (15%) mail-in, for a total of 465 meetings.

Through Saturday, there should have been 252 meetings complete; 256 have reported to date (Note: the party added 2 meetings yesterday, from 465 to 467). To guage how the Liberal leadership candidates are doing through Saturday, 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 through Saturday. We do this by weighting our regional riding projections according to the share of meetings that have taken place so far:

Ontario — 59 of 106 = 56%
Quebec — 25 of 75 = 33%
B.C. — 18 of 36 = 50%
Prairies — 32 of 56 = 57%
Atlantic — 26 of 35 = 74%
Youth — 39 of 57 = 68%
Seniors — 2 of 7 = 29%
Women — 51 of 82 = 62%
Aboriginal — 0 of 13 = 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.