NDP: Two Trends, Alike In Dignity

On Bad Polls And Collapses

Tuesday, Don Davies, the otherwise unremarkable NDP MP for Vancouver Kingsway, decided to tweet about the polls, quote tweeting the Angus Reid poll showing the Liberals only down 3% and the NDP at 10% of the vote. He claimed ”this” happens every election, where in this case “this” means “Liberal funded polls by Liberal pollsters spun by Liberal pundits saying the NDP are done.” He was quote tweeting an Angus Reid poll.

Angus Reid. “Liberal funded polls by Liberal pollsters.” Angus My Senior VP Revived The Bloc Single-handedly With A Terrible Debate Question And Cost The Liberals Majority Government In 2021 Reid. Angus My Eponymous Founder Was Caught In A Residential School Denialism Scandal In October Reid. “Liberal pollster.” It’s just so fucking absurd.

Now, the absurdity gets better in a response from Tuesday night, wherein Davies misunderstands margins of error, slanders Leger for some reason as unreliable and Liberally partisan, and attacks me as a partisan hack. I’d like to point out that I voted NDP in 2021 and ONDP in 2018 and for Catherine McKenney, and also the fact that Leger’s most recent media partners are Postmedia, the Canadian Press, and Quebecor. For those whose heads permanently reside in their asses, those are not actually havens of Liberalism.

Davies’ point is dumb, and it’s fun to make fun of him, but I might as well use this as a chance to talk through the NDP’s terrible polling - and why I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the NDP’s collapse.

The NDP got 18% in 2021, and were polling at 19% on December 9th in the CBC Poll Tracker. For most of this Parliament they’ve bounced in and around 18%, which is basically what they got in 2021. So, nothing happened, right? No. It’s hard to pin any of this down for sure, but I’m pretty positive what happened is the NDP’s 18% radically changed.

In 2021, the NDP’s best province was BC, coming second in votes and winning a majority of their total seats. Their polling has always been soft in the province, at least ever since Poilievre won the CPC Leadership. Poilievre and the Conservatives have spent a lot of time in BC, attacking NDP held seats in Kootenay, Skeena, Powell River, and Vancouver Island - the kinds of places where Erin O’Toole gained votes despite the CPC slipping slightly between 2019 and 2021 or where the PPC attracted a more than nominal vote. And the NDP polling was always soft.

What seems likely is that the NDP rose with Liberal-NDP switchers, in places like Toronto and Ottawa and Montreal, and the party got less popular in the BC heartlands, Northern Ontario, and the Southwest of Ontario. That pattern would fit with what Doug Ford and John Rustad achieved in their most recent provincial elections. The September 2024 byelections were another example of it - big NDP to Conservative swings in some parts of Elmwood-Transcona got bailed out by Liberals saving the NDP, and the NDP strengthened in Montreal on disaffected Liberal votes.

When Justin Trudeau resigned - or at least when Freeland did, which is a better baseline - yes, the NDP held a roughly similar share of the vote that they did in 2021, but my contention is that it was a fundamentally different party. David Coletto’s work on voter segmentation has shown similar things - a March 2024 presentation that broke up the electorate into segments had the NDP vote down 3 with “Anxious Populists” and up 2 with “Progressive Moderates”. (From memory, those labels were pretty self explanatory.)

The 18-19% the NDP had in December wasn’t the fairly mixed party that was split by social liberalism or DEI or Palestinian rights, but a different, more unified party. The Conservative NDP switchers had already left, but nobody noticed because it looked like the vote had gone LPC to CPC while the NDP hung out and chilled in aggregate. But if it was two different flows that essentially canceled out, then the number of NDP voters that would prefer the Liberals would be higher, because their polling was overly reliant on anti-Trudeau Liberals.

Put it another way - was the NDP sticking where they were in the polls about an outpouring of love for Jagmeet, or because the Liberals were led by a leader who hung around for 2 years too long? It was obvious that Singh was a fucking disaster to anyone with eyes and political instincts, so this kind of collapse makes sense when the Liberals are under better management. Because it was never about Singh, it was easy to leave when the problem abated. It’s the difference between someone who loves to exercise and someone who just needs to lose 15 pounds before a wedding - the one who is only doing it for a transactional purpose will always have a looser affiliation to it.

The NDP’s problem is well known and well litigated in these pages, but they’re at a dangerous place. The next election is going to be a head to head contest and in that spot the NDP are an irrelevance. Singh isn’t seen as a serious leader because he isn’t one. It’s pathetic that an institution this important is so hollowed out. Right now they project for 11 seats in my model, one short of official party status. That’s really bad.

(This is an incredibly wonky point and you’re free to skip it, but I disagree with some that the NDP has literal 0 seat downside. A lot of models use proportional swing - if your vote was 20% last time and it’s 10% now, your vote halves. If you do straight swing, that’s a 10 point drop. These kinds of details rarely matter that much for the two majors, but parties like the NDP or the British Lib Dems get artificially boosted or artificially killed by proportionate swing, depending on how they’re polling.

Take something like Hamilton Centre - the NDP vote is down 6% in my average since 2021 in Ontario, which means the NDP goes from 47% to 41% in my model. If I did proportionate, the NDP vote would fall to the mid 30s, and they would be in a lot more trouble. In my straight swing model, they still win by 15%. To prove this point, despite having the NDP higher in Ontario overall in his average, 338 has the NDP vote lower in Hamilton Centre than me. It’s not a huge problem, but if the NDP really gets to 10-12% nationally it could become noticeable whether seat projection services have the NDP losing super safe seats.)

There’s a lot New Democrats are going to need to fix, but I don’t think the confusion some have about why the NDP vote is moving en masse to the Liberals is necessary - mostly because it’s not en masse. It’s two movements, two trends, that happened at the same time that messed with the analysis and left the NDP vulnerable to a revived LPC. Good thing we gave them one.