Mainstreet, Oxford, And Byelection Polls

On What It All Means

At what point do we wonder about the polls?

If you took the polls at face value right now Pierre Poilievre would hold a plurality of seats and the Liberals, NDP, and Greens would not represent a Commons majority, whether on the new lines or the old. Whether or not you believe that is predictive of an election in the future, right now the Government’s not in great shape in the polls.

The reason this is interesting is there’s four byelections next week – the Liberal coronation in my parents’ old Montreal stomping grounds, the Conservative-PPC battle in Portage-Lisgar, and then two LPC-CPC fights – a Liberal defence in Winnipeg South Centre and a CPC one in Oxford.

If all you knew was national polls and district partisanships, you’d think Oxford would be a landslide for the CPC but Winnipeg South Centre would be potentially touch and go – albeit the Liberals would be strongly favoured, just with a likely reduced majority. But no, it’s Oxford – with a CPC +27 result in 2021 – that’s the squeaker, according to Mainstreet.

And if Mainstreet is directionally correct – a status quo result in Winnipeg and a very close race in Oxford – at what point do we start to wonder about the national polls?

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During Harper’s majority Parliament, the Tories routinely saw huge byelection swings against them  - nearly losing Brandon Souris and Calgary Centre on swings around 40%, and routinely losing huge amounts of vote share to the Opposition. It was classic byelection behaviour – the government was unpopular and a combination of incumbent party apathy and anger saw huge swings. If the government is as unpopular as the pundits claim – and as the vote shares in the high 20s suggest – why did Mississauga Lakeshore not swing to the Tories, and why do Oxford and Winnipeg project to be great news for the Liberals?

Now, Oxford is obviously in part local factors – the Liberals are running a former PC candidate in the riding and the Tories parachuted a non-local in, to the point where the outgoing Tory endorsed the Liberal – but still, that should be why the Tories win this by 15 and not more, not why it should be a tie, per Mainstreet.

For those who want the take on Mainstreet – no, I don’t believe Oxford is actually going to be a tie, but their Mississauga Lakeshore poll was pretty accurate. Notably, the sample on the Oxford poll is higher than the individual ones in Alberta, so that should provide a bit less chance of randomness, but we’ll have to see. But unless they’re off by 15 fucking points, which is possible but highly unlikely, then the Tories are going to have a bad result.

I set the benchmark for the Tories at a 15% win in Oxford, because the local factors do matter, but a result much worse than that has some national implications. And at some point we need to discuss whether those implications mean something.

There is an idea that this government is running on fumes because of these national polls, but usually when a government is running out of time there’s a congruence between polls and votes. In Ontario, the end of Kathleen Wynne was augured by byelection swings routinely around 20%, and in the end times of John Major and the ongoing end times of this Tory government in the UK, the byelections, local elections, and the polls all pointed in the same direction. Federally in Canada? They don’t.

What does it mean? It’s unclear, mostly because I am going to attempt to look at this through something resembling unbiased eyes. It’s hard to, because I want the explanation to be that the polls are wrong, the byelections are the “right” metric, and therefore that the government’s fine. But the thing is, the national polls don’t seem that wrong to me? The government’s had a bad session and have been unfocused, so it’s not a surprise that a government that got 32% last time is now polling at 30 on average.

That said, the idea that the NDP will actually get these gaudy vote shares when the chips are down is nonsense from people who don’t understand politics or our history, and I’ve long said that I don’t get what Poilievre is doing as an opposition leader, so the only theory that makes any sense is that the Liberals are unpopular and the difference between the polls is various levels of indifference. Abacus’ last poll had 30% of the country wanting a change but unpersuaded by the alternatives. If that’s broadly true, it’s not hard to get a rough tie or a sizeable lead whether that group lean one way or another in any poll. But it’s fair to say that Poilievre is not making much of an impression.

The only way to square these byelection polls – and the Mississauga result – with the national polls is that there is a group of voters who are pissed at the Liberals but not actually mad or disappointed enough to really vote differently when the time comes. It’s a shame, in a sense, we never got a byelection in 2021, when the government was riding those huge wins. It would have been a fun test in the reverse – whether the Tory vote would have snapped back at a byelection in the way it did when the writ dropped. Right now, it seems like the disaffected Liberal vote that’s parking with the NDP or the CPC right now isn’t surviving contact with actually having to vote, and that should worry the Conservatives.

At some point the Tories have to stop being a story of the day opposition and try and figure something out to get to a position where the actual opportunity to vote for them isn’t something that scares voters off. If they don’t get a hold of this, it’s possible – if not overwhelmingly likely – that even if we get an election sometime soon, the Liberals will just get their voters to snap back even without a better economy.

The Tories have fundamentally decided to not make their opposition about an alternate substantive vision – Scott Aitchison is doing the lord’s work on housing, but other than him, it’s about bland sloganeering and whack a mole opposition. And if Mainstreet is even remotely close to correct, it’s gotta be concerning to Tories that their actual performances in actual byelections isn’t capitalizing on their polling.

Maybe Mainstreet’s wildly wrong, maybe the Tories come close in Winnipeg and Oxford is a blowout. Maybe, but unless that happens, there’s a lot concerning for the Tories that their polls are not being even remotely reflected when voters get their opportunities. And if that’s true, they’ll need to find a new tactical path forward, or else they’ll end up like Ed Miliband’s Labour Party – always leading the polls, never in office.