If CPC Win, It'll Be In Spite Of Poilievre

On Angus Reid's Polling

Angus Reid came out with a data set today on views on Pierre Poilievre, and the results aren’t good for the Tory leader. Andy Scheer was essentially net neutral 3 months in to his leadership, and O’Toole was 6 points underwater. Poilievre? 33-54, a massive 21 points underwater.

The more notable thing here is clearly not just the net approvals, but the story is actually just about how stable the pool of people who generally like the Conservative leader is. The last three have had approvals of 34, 36, and 33, and what has happened is that a lot of the don’t knows on O’Toole and Scheer were liberals who didn’t have strong opinions on either of them yet, and came to have negative ones.

Poilievre is, at this point, in the same range – which is also the range the Tory vote has lived in under the united parties. The Conservative Party of Canada has never had a vote share with either a 2 in front of it or a 4, because there is, in aggregate, somewhere between 31 and 39% willing to vote for the Tories. When the Liberals run Ignatieff and have no platform, they get decimals away from 40%, and when the Liberals are riding high, they fall to the low 30s.

Obviously the Tories have traded voters in specific­ – they’ve traded well off social liberals in the Horseshoe for cultural conservatives in what would have to be crudely referred to as the “regions” – Northern Ontario, non-urban BC, and Atlantic Canada – but in aggregate the Tories are stuck in the same place.

What has happened is they keep changing the leader in the hopes that it will suddenly change that structural problem for them, in the same way that they put up with Harper’s incoherence and utter insanity from an ideology perspective in the hopes that next time he’d get them over the line. To win a majority government at the fourth time of asking was a genuine accomplishment, but it was also mostly just a function of the Liberals picking a horrible leader.

Why does it matter? Because the Conservatives are stuck in a place where nobody really knows what to do or where to go from here. For all the talk of “Fordism”, nobody actually can identify anything that Ford specifically did to make himself popular enough to win again other than run against Horwath and Del Duca and be the Premier who (rightly or wrongly) was seen to have been where the people mostly were on COVID policy. There’s no actual lesson from it, mostly because run against shit candidates isn’t something in the party’s control.

So, what do the Tories do? Play leader roulette, and just pray to God the next guy is better than the current one. Right now, it looks like he isn’t.

…

The Conservative Party will eventually win another election in this country. Whatever dreams we occasionally get about the NDP supplanting them as the main opposition will not happen, and the Tories will win again, and probably this decade.

The problem is, they make it so much harder for themselves because there’s no recognition of the basic facts that the politics that appeal to the Conservative selectorate are electoral poison to the general electorate. For the Tories, this basic Paradox is their undoing, because their members pick shitty leaders.

Even beyond the fact that the membership pick shit leaders, the existence of the membership makes the list of candidates pretty shit, because talented people don’t run knowing they’ll get some pittance of the vote. Would a Conservative Party led by Lisa Raitt have won the 2019 election? I don’t know, but I do suspect that she would have done a lot better than Andrew Scheer, and certainly the horrible electoral map that O’Toole inherited whereby there were 2 seats in Brampton and Mississauga that were within 20% wouldn’t have existed post 2019. But she got single digit support in 2017, because of course she did.

We’ve seen what this cycle leads to in Ontario, where John Tory, Tim Hudak, and then Tim Hudak 2.0 let a bad Liberal government get re-elected easily 3 times. What ended up happening was that the wheels fell on that government, and then whoever led the Tories into that election was always going to win in a walk. The fact that the Liberals detonated Patrick Brown meant it was Doug, but anyone was going to win the 2018 election as long as they had the blue party leadership.

Federally, there’s two ways this Liberal Government ends – the Tories nominate a good leader who is able to make the Tories more popular, or the Liberals just get so bogged down in their own morass and the wheels fall off. The problem with much of the analysis is that people are conflating the chances of both, and in some cases flat out lying about the popularity of Pierre Poilievre.

What Mississauga showed, and what common sense and this poll confirms, is that there is no groundswell of “run through fire” Conservative voters out there. If there was this huge outpouring of support for Poilievre, he’d have done better than 2021 in the seat, and probably would have created turnout in the 30s at least. The reason I don’t think the byelection matters much is because I never believed this anger and outrage existed, so this doesn’t change my priors at all. But what it does do is make something clear – if the Tories win in 2025, it’ll be in spite of Skippy.

The Tories are not running a leader who has meaningfully broadened the Conservative tent, and he has not meaningfully changed the Tory Party’s long term pattern of being a party for 35% of the country, give or take 4% on either side. What he will have done is change the composition of the ~35% - it’ll be more culturally conservative workers and less socially liberal professionals – but he isn’t changing the very nature of the game.

If the Tories win the next election it’ll be because the Liberals run out of gas – which, honestly, I just don’t see. The deal with the NDP has breathed new life into the, yes often slow responding, policy ambitions of this government, and they will go into the next election with a concrete record of having done shit, after having gone into 2019 with the Child Benefit and 2021 having handled COVID. Trudeau is no slouch, as much as Conservatives who don’t like him want to pretend, and the likelihood is a better economy in 2025 than exists today.

Could they lose? Me saying Poilievre can’t win was, as I’ve said before, stupid, just because idle overconfidence can kill. That said, my sense of whether Poilievre can become PM or not is so close to zero as to be functionally worth ignoring. I don’t think he can win, and the fact that 54% of people know enough about him to have a negative opinion about him this early is fundamentally devastating. If he pivots, he just becomes O’Toole 2.0, and if he stays the course he will not only fail to gain enough suburban seats to scrape a path to a majority with the support of the Bloc, but he will go backwards in the Kitcheners and Niagaras and Vaughans he needs to become PM.

If Poilievre becomes PM it will be in spite of himself, and the idea that Poilievre’s personal popularity and cult of personality will see him into office is for the birds. His only hope is the Liberals just completely lose control of the car – but he should ask Tim Hudak how that can go.