Brian Pallister most competent, trustworthy leader: Vote Compass

Progressive Conservative Leader Brian Pallister scored best among all the main party leaders for both competencyand trustworthiness, according to new results from Vote Compass.

The findings are based on 10,623 respondents who participated in Vote Compass from March 15 to April 11, 2016.

According to the data, Pallister scored 4.2 out of 10 for trustworthiness and 4.8 out of 10 for competency as a leader.

When politicians are ranked on trustworthiness they tend to score low generally, said political analyst Christopher Adams.The data becomes a lot more revealing when you compare the leaders'scores to eachother.

On the question of trustworthiness, NDP Leader Greg Selinger scored the lowest, 2.5 out of 10, followed by Green Leader James Beddome with 3.1 out of 10 and Manitoba Liberal Leader Rana Bokhari with 3.5 out of 10.

"Clearly Brian Pallister is ahead of the other candidates," said Adams, scoring 4.2 out of 10 for trustworthiness.

Selinger's relatively low trustworthiness score, 2.5 out of 10, has to do with two factors in Adam's opinion.

"One is that he's the only one who's the premier," said Adams.

"It could be that if Pallister were the premier he might score lower."

The second factor for Adams is some of the PC's messages might be gaining traction with Manitobans.

The PC party'smain mantra "Broken Promises" could be affecting voter opinion,said Adams.

Looking at the results by gender, Adams said it is interesting to see Rana Bokhari was not a runaway success among female respondentscompared to the other candidates.

Selinger does markedlybetter among women than men, conversely Pallister does better among men than women on both questions of trustworthiness and competency.

"When you look at polling data over the past 20 years the NDP has a slight advantage among women compared to men," said Adams.

WhereasBokhari scores fairly evenly among men and women.

On trustworthiness, men scored Bokhari 3.4 out of 10 while women scored the female leader 3.7 out of ten. On competency as a leader, both men and women scored Bokhari 3.4 out of 10.

"I would have thought there would be a stronger difference because she's the only woman leader among these people," said Adams.

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Developed by a team of social and statistical scientists from Vox Pop Labs, Vote Compass is a civic engagement application offered in Canada exclusively by CBC News.

The findings are based on 10,623 respondents who participated in Vote Compass from March 15 to April 11, 2016. 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 geography, gender, age, educational attainment, occupation, and religion to ensure the sample's composition reflects that of the actual population of Manitoba according to census data and other population estimates.