Thomas Mulcair is the front-runner in the NDP's leadership campaign.

An internal poll done by Paul Dewar's camp suggests Thomas Mulcair is the front-runner in the NDP's leadership campaign.

An internal poll done by Paul Dewar's camp suggests Thomas Mulcair is the front-runner in the NDP's leadership campaign.
David Cooper/Toronto Star
Joanna Smith Ottawa Bureau

OTTAWA—Thomas Mulcair is the front-runner in the New Democratic leadership race and is on track to win a quarter of votes on the first ballot, according to an internal poll done by the campaign for rival Ottawa MP Paul Dewar.

The first internal survey to be made public in the race to replace the late Jack Layton as leader on March 24 caused a stir on Monday, with three campaigns welcoming — and spinning — what they viewed as good news for their candidates and a third insisting their poor showing does not reflect reality.

The results say that 25.5 per cent of decided voters support Mulcair as their first choice, while 16.8 per cent support Toronto MP Peggy Nash, 15.1 per cent support Dewar, 12.8 per cent support British Columbia MP Nathan Cullen and 12.7 per cent named veteran party strategist Brian Topp as their first choice.

Twenty-nine per cent of the 6,373 card-carrying NDP members who participated in the automated telephone poll were undecided when asked to pick the candidate they support in the leadership race.

The Dewar campaign played up a number showing the Ottawa MP in first place for second choice to support their argument that he can emerge victorious, but withheld polling data about whose supporters would go where if their preferred candidate drops off the ballot.

The Topp campaign moved quickly to dismiss the results.

“Needless to say, we know from our own polling and canvassing that the findings don’t reflect what’s happening on the ground,” says an email that national campaign director Raymond Guardia apparently sent to campaign staff. It notes that telephone calls to 7,500 voting party members over the past two weeks showed 28 per cent of them intend to support Topp on the first ballot.

Guardia later told the Star that an internal poll done for the Topp campaign last November “doesn’t compare at all” to the Dewar poll, but would say nothing more about it except that it did not put Mulcair in first place.

The leadership campaigns for Mulcair and Nash, on the other hand, reacted warmly to what the Dewar campaign had put in the window.

“This confirms what we knew: Tom is ahead. It also confirms . . . that there is a real battle going on between four different candidates for second place,” said a senior official with the Mulcair campaign.

The Nash campaign spun the results her way.

“Not only does it reflect what we have been seeing ourselves — that this race is boiling down to a decision between Peggy and Tom, since they are both in the lead for the first choice of voters — it shows just how strong the second-choice support for Peggy is,” campaign spokeswoman Zuzia Danielski wrote in an email Monday.

The poll was conducted by the Dewar campaign using interactive voice-response calling provided by Vaughan-based Solus One on Feb. 8 and 9, but participants were not told that it had anything to do with the Ottawa MP.

The Dewar campaign says it weighted the responses to “accurately reflect” the NDP membership numbers provided to campaigns on Feb. 2.

The campaign says it contacted 56,522 members of the NDP for the poll, received responses from 6,373 and that the margin of error was 1.19 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.