Just How Much Trouble Are The Conservatives In?

Mental Exercises, Etc

One of the questions that people love indulging in elections is what I’ve referred to as “Zombie Poll-ification”, but what is more accurately FrankenPoll-ification - stitching together different regionals or other crosstabs from the different polls to claim some sort of momentum or actually claim it’s close. It’s been rampant this campaign, whether in the form of regional data or age crosstabs - choosing Nanos’ Boomer numbers as proof of some sort of sign that Poilievre is breaking through, when nobody has it, is currently in vogue - but it’s all innumerate. That said, let’s indulge it.

As of Friday night, when I did this exercise, you could stitch together the best polls for the Conservatives currently in my polling average - all polls released this week - and things would look better for the Conservatives. Shocker, I know. But what is slightly surprising is that even in that situation, where you stitch together the best case scenarios everywhere, the Conservatives still lose and lose resoundingly. They’d get up to the incredible heights of *checks notes* 140 seats, and the Liberals would still gain seats (to get to 168) and the Liberals and NDP would still be a majority of Parliament.

The honest truth is I don’t really believe the Liberals will really win 200 seats, but when I did a drunken gut check, I still had 192. The problem with this campaign is that at a macro level this feels absurd, but dig into the regionals and the seats and a Liberal landslide goes from insane to obvious.

Like, toss out the polls for a second, and tell me why Pierre Poilievre and his campaign is well suited to win Kitchener, Saint Catharines, Kanata, or Oakville. You could have said last year that housing would be the way you get suburban social liberals to vote for a political party that’s not super appealing to believers in those things, but now that’s not true. Poilievre only has a 1% edge in Saturday’s Abacus on the issue of housing, which is an incredible testament to the work of Sean Fraser and Nate Erskine-Smith in the last 18 months. But without housing, how can Poilievre break through in the suburbs?

Crime and drug policy will play, sure, but that tends to play best in heavily ethnic minority seats, as John Rustad’s BC Conservatives show. If that’s true, then it’s very possible that Poilievre gets big swings in Surrey and Scarborough and Brampton … but the terrible, horrible, no good results for the CPC under O’Toole and Scheer in those places mean big swings produce little or no gains in seats.

I think the Atlantic Canadian polling is way too rosy for the Liberals, and I have a lot of questions about the state of the Liberal candidate selections in some Newfoundland seats especially. But in a world where the model says they’re getting 200 seats, another 6 Atlantic losses compared to the model would be mostly irrelevant. Alberta looks shaky, and depending on my mood I can either argue for 3 seats (EdCentre, McKnight, and gaining Southeast) or 7 (Skyview, Confed, CalCentre, and then another of the close-ish Edmontons). If you believe that tactical voting is real and prevalent, then it’s probably 7. I don’t, but it’s certainly logical and consistent.

The other part of this that’s clear is the Conservatives are freaking out. Kory Teneycke unloaded earlier this week on Wankers Of The World Unite (or whatever that podcast is called) about the state of the Conservative time, and he was entirely correct. His critique of the party is cogent and coherent and drawn from a legitimate desire for the party to get its shit together and he’s being attacked as disloyal.

It’s worth pointing out that a lot of his critiques are neither new nor original - friend of the show and Monday’s Scrimshaw Show guest Sarah Biggs made many of the same points on West of Centre in fucking February - but that doesn’t mean he’s not right. (It does mean that we should probably take Sarah significant more seriously - why she doesn’t have more TV gigs is beyond me - but I am unfortunately not responsible for programming at any of the networks. It is their, and their audiences’, loss.)

So, if the Conservatives polling is shit (and it is) and the smart Conservative-ologists know they’re fucked worse than the OF star who filmed 100 guys running a train on her, why would we think this is suddenly going to tighten? Do we think the campaign that is going desperately negative when their leader has significant problems with women and is already net negative on personal ratings is going great? Abacus finds that all of the attacks on Carney have led to an increase in his personal ratings. And I’m supposed to believe this can change?

Again, if you take the best regional for the CPC everywhere, they’re still fucked. If you take the vibes case, they’re fucked. If you assume a polling miss they’re fucked. They’re losing so badly that they would need the biggest polling miss in modern Canadian polling history to even scrape a plurality of seats - in arguably the most polled campaign ever. Part of why provinces tend to have bigger polling misses is we’re lucky sometimes to have a single non-Mainstreet poll, or we have a handful at best. Here, we have 12 national pollsters with releases this week.

Last Saturday the Conservatives projected for 117 seats. Today, in the update I’ll post in a couple hours assuming no other polls come out, they project for, wait for it … 117 seats. But Warren Kinsella is claiming it’s tightening. Sure.

We want to think this race is close because it sells copy and boosts ratings and clicks. It’s not. It might become close at some point! But it’s not now. There is no way, no matter how you slice it, where this election is currently close. It’s not, and the thing is Conservatives know it. The big difference is whether they admit it now or in the pages of some Althia Raj longread on May 3rd.