Media Failure And Poilievre's Electability

On That Abacus Data

So, uh, remember all those political insiders who claimed that Pierre Poilievre had solved politics and was riding a wave of broad discontent that would see him enter … I would say 24 Sussex, but we’ve just decided that’s not getting fixed, so Rideau Cottage, I guess? Yeah, not according to Abacus Data, who have released three sets of vote intention questions today – one a standard one, one with Skippy as the named party leader, and one with Charest as the named CPC party leader.

We can dispense with the Charest one – the PPC gets 11% and a Charest-led CPC falls to ~90 seats, per a uniform swing model – but the Poilievre poll is fascinating, in so far as the narrative around the campaign that Poilievre is running is so entirely divorced from the facts. (Once again, polls in 2022 do not have bearing on election results in 2025, and this is not critical of those thinking that Pierre will win in 2025 because the Liberals run out of gas.)

Remember when we were told that Poilievre had that magic touch with the electorate? That he was riding a wave of discontent? When he was saying out loud what the people were thinking? How’s that working out, again?

My arguments against Poilievre’s future electability are well known at this point and frankly not rehashing, given that the next election is a long time from now. What I’ve also pushed back against, however, is the notion that electability within the Conservative selectorate is proof of the sum of fuck and all when it comes to electability within the general populace. Like, not to take a victory lap because it wasn’t very impressive, but I have seen the level of his popularity within the Conservative membership this whole fucking time, and have rightly dismissed the puffed up bullshit of Charest and Brown. This is not a situation where I don’t get the appeal of Poilievre, it’s a situation where I fully understand who he is appealing to, given the fact that I properly estimated his leadership election chances.

The evidence that Poilievre has a dedicated base of supporters who will ride or die for him is broad and deep, but the evidence that his support is broadly shared – as opposed to being a very vocal group of rabble-rousers – has never existed. The last time we got hypothetical vote intention data was a Leger poll months ago which had a Poilievre-led CPC in the high 20s, but since then, this sense that Poilievre is a serious, robust threat who must be organized against now has taken root in the commentariat, without any shred of evidence of his general election electability.

Oh, wait, we have evidence – he did a one shot video in Pearson, how stupid of me. I know this counts as evidence because Scott “I Cost The Liberals An Election By Saying The Child Benefit Was Bad Because People Would Use It For Beer And Popcorn” Reid told me so, and because a person who used to have a title said something, it has to be true. After all, how could someone who didn’t make a campaign altering gaffe have anything to add about all of this, how silly of me.

The problem with all of this unsourced, unmathed bullshit is that it is always quoting some political operative with incentive to lie off the record as if they have some brilliant wisdom, which we know is a crock of shit from the 9000 times campaigns have gotten caught out with election results not matching their internal projections, but we especially know isn’t true in this country, because we got the laughable pre-Brown expulsion stories that #actually Pierre’s in a weak spot and Charest and Brown both have paths to victory, which both me and Bryan Breguet independently came to the same conclusion – it’s bullshit. (Also, as everyone knows, getting Bryan and I to agree on anything is a minor miracle, so everyone can be well assured that it’s not bias on either of our parts.)

So why do we get this sort of reporting? Because it’s easier for the networks and the papers to let their columnists pontificate than it is to call any fucking political data person and just check that their math isn’t a steaming crock of shit. Would that necessary stop the torrent of headlines that end up looking bad in hindsight? No – I got Ontario wrong, Fournier called O’Toole the favourite over Trudeau, there’s not perfection in this, but the idea of letting people whose job isn’t the math of politics to opine on the likelihood of outcomes is a bad idea. The math is very important, and much more important than whether or not Jean Charest’s campaign is telling you they have enough points or whatever bullshit it is this week.

The problem with political media is that there are two very distinct jobs – reporting and covering the news of the day, and predicting whether or not that news is electorally meaningful. This site (mostly) avoids the former – I don’t often write full columns about health transfers or whether or not gun control bills will or won’t actually reduce gun crime, because that isn’t my gig. I am grossly unqualified to do that, and so I avoid it. The fact that I bothered getting into the weeds of the Nova Scotia RCMP stuff is fairly shocking, because it’s just not my gig and it’s not my style. But in the same way, reporters and anchors aren’t qualified to discuss the electoral impacts of the stories they cover, because that’s not the gig they’re doing.

Think about what a political news show in this country is – the first half of the show is news (badly done news, but news), and then the next half is them having people on to opine on whether or not the news will matter. What is a Power Panel if not four people guessing whether or not story A or story B will move the polls, with a host who decided that this is important news! It’s an inherent conflict, because the anchor and their staff decided it is important news, and it makes shit TV to say that, honestly, this probably won’t matter electorally. As much as I love many of the people who appear on these panels, with the greatest of respect, I don’t give a fuck if your softball league or your beer league hockey team is captivated by these stories or not – or whatever other nonsense these Twitter-obsessed news junkies use as their way to get the sense of what “normal people” think.

You think this is an exaggeration? Remember the great commentariat meltdown that the Liberals were actually at risk of losing the 2021 election, and how it was bullshit? Outside of Fournier, nobody in the data world believed it – Mainstreet spent 0 days with the Liberals and NDP combining for less than 170 seats, and I think the lowest Bryan ever had the Liberals was the mid 140s in seats. All the data analysts (except Fournier) knew from the start what this race was – one where the Tories needed the polls to be more wrong than the already (clearly wrong) polls were to have a chance at victory. Had you listened to the commentariat, the Liberals were in high crisis, all because nobody wanted to actually check if the narrative was true or not.

The same thing happened here – a very loud, large group of (let’s be honest, mostly white) people descended on Ottawa this year and the media decided they were speaking for a broad section of society, for … reasons. It never bothered any of these people to think about the fact they’re clearly the minority, that the polls say the vast majority had no sympathy for their views, and that the voters outside of the Conservative tent already were likely to be focused in ridings where them going from PPC to CPC would have little to no impact. These arguments never bothered thinking through the fact that a CPC that moves to the right to cut off the PPC would be ripe to lose voters on its left – despite Marjory LeBreton saying she doesn’t feel at home in Skippy’s CPC – and the fact that a 2021 O’Toole voter lost to the Liberals is worth more to the CPC than a 2021 Bernier voting coming home to the CPC.

Again, if you think Poilievre wins the next election, whatever – it’s a perfectly defensible argument that you have a bunch of evidence to make. But the idea that Poilievre is popular now was always harder to make, because the only evidence was either Twitter videos or crowd size, and as I keep pointing out, those were the cases for Jeremy Corbyn’s electability, who led the Labour Party to the worst result in their post-war history. Remember how many members he signed up? Remember how big his crowds were? Remember how much “enthusiasm” he had because he had tapped into the views of normal people outside of the London bubble?

The Corbyn comp works in a lot of ways, because just as Poilievre is an attempt to give the Conservative membership the uncut, pure version of the halfway house they had voted for last time, Corbyn was the left’s antidote to the middling, compromising Miliband leadership. The argument for Corbyn was that Miliband accrued all the political penalties of a left-wing agenda around high taxes and debt without proposing any or many of the popular policies that would justify the increased taxes and borrowing. In the same way, the case for Poilievre is that he can hold what they won last time and make inroads into working class, formerly industrial cities hollowed out by manufacturing and globalization and all that and win seats that the cozy suburban moderate vision of the party never could win. (Where I disagree with this idea is that there are enough of these seats, but it’s certainly not unfair to suggest that Poilievre gives them a better chance of flipping swathes of Northern Ontario or Vancouver Island than O’Toole.)

The problem with the Corbynite vision, of course, was that his theoretical winning coalition was excitable students and young leftwingers in London and the south, and then old working class cultural conservatives in the north, and a strategy designed to maximize one has impacts on the other. When Corbyn finally took a pro-Remain stance, he kissed goodbye dozens of Midlands and Northern seats, but had he kept a Leave stance, the Lib Dems would have destroyed them across the South.

I’m not saying Poilievre is that toxic, or that he will lead the Tories to some disastrous result, but what I am saying is that him as a Corbyn-esque figure whose popularity with the membership and the base never properly translates to the general population, and yet the messianic way the media talks about Poilievre is unmoored from any actual understanding of where people actually are or what people actually want. It’s easier to just let the narrative set the frame of how he’s talked and written about.

It's clear at this point that Poilievre is going to win the Tory leadership. It’s also clear that right now, Poilievre is not the electoral juggernaut the press and certain ex-Liberals with a podcast want to pretend he is. Whatever you think happens from here, a lot of people have gotten this wrong up to now.