Stephen Harper’s Conservatives made gains for the third week in a row on the Nanos Party Power Index as Tom Mulcair’s NDP stayed steady once again.

Though the NDP stayed atop the index for the 10th week in a row at 55 points out of a possible 100, the Conservatives climbed another point up to 53 points, further shrinking the five-point gap that existed at the beginning of July.

Speaking on CTV’s Power Play Tuesday, pollster Nik Nanos spoke of recent polling results and said: “What’s interesting is that the direction now is starting to favour the Conservatives, while the NDP and the Liberal tracking numbers are starting to look a little flat – flatter than they have been in the past. So we got to watch the trend, because it’s the trend that counts.”

Nanos described the index as a sort of “advanced indicator” that reflects some of the underlying opinions that influence voter behaviour. Though the index isn’t a direct measurement of which party voters are leaning towards, Nanos said an index upswing could soon translate into increased support for Harper’s party.

“We’re going to have to watch over the next couple of weeks to see if the Conservatives are able to convert this into more support,” he told CTVNews.ca.

Harper has also climbed significantly in the individual leader categories, according to this week’s Nanos survey. The latest numbers show 31 per cent of those polled would prefer Harper as prime minister, compared to 28 per cent for Mulcair and 22 per cent for Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

At the beginning of July, all three leaders were polling around 26 per cent.

On the question of whether the party heads had the qualities of a good leader, Harper also improved, moving two points up to 55 per cent this week. Mulcair still leads this question with 59 per cent of respondents saying he has good leadership qualities, while Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe and Justin Trudeau were third and fourth in this category, respectively, at 47 and 44 per cent.

NDP plateau?

Though they haven’t seen any real decline in numbers, the New Democrats have effectively levelled out in most categories over the past several weeks.

And in terms of accessible voters – the percentage of people who say they would consider voting for a certain party – the NDP has seen a slight dip.

While 50 per cent of voters say they would consider voting for the NDP, they’re down from 52 per cent last week. The Conservatives this week stayed even at 42 per cent, while the Liberals dropped one point to 45 per cent.

The Nanos Party Power Index comprises a basket of political goods that includes ballot preferences, accessible voters, preferred PM views and evaluations of the leaders. It is modeled similar to a standard confidence index. The results are based on a four-week rolling average of opinion solicited through a random telephone survey of 1,000 Canadians in the period ending July 31, 2015. It is considered accurate plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.