Pierre Poilievre And Fake Crises

Filling Column Inches, One Sorta Lie At A Time

One of my favourite past times is trying to figure out the anatomy of a story – a game I used last week when discussing that “leaked” NDP memo that conveniently made its way into the Star – but this time, it’s not just one story I’m fascinated by, but a whole genre of them, with the same throughline.

Is Pierre Poilievre In Trouble?

The short answer to this question is “no”, but because that’s no fun, and it’s also not a column on its own, let’s walk through first the media of it all, and then the Conservative leadership of it all.

This genre of story has been bubbling through for a while, with a Brian Lilley Op-Ed calling out Poilievre being used that he is wearing out his welcome with his party faithful, but then Abacus Data released a poll showing Poilievre’s favourables down and his disfavourables up, so now we’re cooking with some gas. Then, David Coletto of Abacus was interviewed for a piece in the Post about it, and there were some comments from Skippy-friendly CPC members who thought his French debate performance wasn’t good and are now looking at playing the field a bit more.

My guess is that this will speed up as the Ontario election comes and goes and this becomes the predominant political story of the summer, but what we’re seeing is the start of a wave of panels and articles asking this question, if only because there’s nothing more interesting to talk about. And all of this generalized panic is on the basis of one poll, which still has Skippy 28 points above water with Conservative voters, which had Patrick Brown’s favourables down 6 points in a month, and which has Jean Charest 1 point above water. Charest’s name ID is basically even with Skippy’s, and while 63% of Conservative voters are positive or neutral on Poilievre, only 50% are positive or neutral on Charest.

That’s the road Charest has to take to win this – one where he is less popular with the membership, has nearly double the negatives (25% for Charest, 14% for Poilievre), and needs all of his neutrals to break for him to even have a chance.

Oh, wait, it’s actually much worse, because Abacus isn’t even polling the Conservative membership.

If Charest would be drawing an inside straight to win the leadership on the polling of Conservative voters, then he has exactly zero chance of winning a race amongst the membership, because the average Tory voter is miles to the left of the average Tory member. Think about abortion, to take but the most obvious example of this. There’s a decent amount of polling that suggests the average Tory voter is pro choice (or, at least, not adamantly pro-life), but the membership is made up much more of ardent pro-lifers than the voter base at large, because apolitical “tax cuts, competence, and no stupid woke shit” centrists in Stittsville or Kanata Lakes (I’m literally describing a dozen people I personally know and like) don’t turn out in leadership races, but those animated by abortion as their leading issue will vote in greater numbers.

Look at the Conservative voter base, either in polls today or in the 2021 election, and you’ll see an electorate that is overwhelmingly vaccinated people. Mathematically, it has to be, given the rates of vaccination across the country, especially amongst adults, and yet you see a leadership contest where fighting for the rights of the unvaxxed is one of the things that animates the candidates – especially Lewis and Baber, who are Poilievre’s rivals on his right.

I bring all of this up because in both 2020 and 2017, the candidate of non-social conservatives – Peter MacKay and Maxime Bernier – were both massively overstated by polls of Conservatives voters. In 2017, Bernier was supposed to get 45% of the vote based on the last poll of the voter pool, and he got 29% on the first ballot. MacKay, in 2020, was at a high flying 55% of the vote amongst voters, and he got 34% on the first ballot. If Skippy’s in a dominant position with the voter pool, who on earth is catching him from his moderate left in the membership? It’s certainly not Charest.

Maybe it’s Patrick Brown, and I respect the fuck out of Rob Silver who has hinted/suggested/intuited that he sees Brown as a more serious contender than I or the general commentariat do, based on his ability to sign up members. I could be wrong and he actually signs up a lot of members, but Brown’s skill – organizing in ethnic communities – doesn’t actually go very far in a points-based voting system. There are maybe 50 ridings in this country where the vast majority of his signups will be from – yes, the ones you’re thinking of. Brampton, Mississauga, the new city of Toronto, Vancouver, a couple in Calgary. That’s where Brown will be signing up the vast majority of his members, and whether he signs up 200/riding or 25000/riding, it doesn’t matter in a points system where a spread out support base is worth more. Running up the score in heavily ethnic seats and then getting basically fuck all in support in Quebec (where he can’t speak French), Atlantic Canada (mostly homogeneously white and where he has no ties), and basically every riding from Renfrew County to Kelowna (social conservatives) is a losing recipe.

So, why are we getting a narrative of weakness from the press? Because they need him to be weak to fill column inches and TV panels. Do you have any idea how much the press will go batty if they get a Conservative leadership race that’s a dud and the most boring election campaign of all time in Ontario back to back? They will have a collective meltdown, and while I will laugh very hard, segment producers and editors across this great land need this leadership race to fill their summer of coverage, especially given Quebec is looking like a snoozefest and the rest to replace Kenney is currently stuck in legal challenges and uncertainty. They need this, because without this they’re up shit’s creek without a paddle, to quote my grandfather.

Look, I know that I am not always good at predicting the future – as my Steven Del Duca will be Premier tweets show – but I am good at analyzing this exact sort of failure. Is Skippy the next Conservative leader? Probably – I mean, I genuinely can’t find a way he loses a final round, I really don’t. But what I know, for dead certain, is that everyone begging for this to become a race is either a Conservative partisan who values electability highest and is therefore supporting Brown, Charest, or Aitchison, or a media executive who needs this race to be interesting so people read their work or stay on their television channel.

This incentive – crass as it is laid out like this – is the reason that Coletto’s poll became the hook for a Skippy falling story and not a “Charest is nowhere to be seen” one. This isn’t an issue with Abacus, or the reporter who wrote the Post story, because inherently nothing in that story is untrue. Coletto correctly points out that for the first time, his data shows Skippy’s numbers getting worse. All of it is factually true.

And in another sense all of it is a crock of fucking shit.

For nearly a whole year I tried to write daily content during the 2020 Presidential election, and sometimes twice a day. I was a content machine, because building a brand, in my mind, required a soulless devotion to having content out every day to keep that site on people’s minds. It was great experience, and I would be nowhere close to as good a writer now if I hadn’t done it, but the daily grind of that informed the way that choices matter. Why do writers get increasingly frisky and write, let’s be honest, dumb and bad takes about how maybe Democrats could win red states or how Conservatives could break through in Quebec or about the NDP basically anywhere? Because we get bored writing the same shit over and over, so we end up in a situation where the commentariat ends up reaching for something, anything else.

You think I’m excluding myself from this narrative? It was when I got bored out of my mind writing the same shit about Georgia and Wisconsin and Michigan and Arizona that I started getting increasingly bullish on Democrats in Texas and their Senate chances in South Carolina. What should have happened is I absolutely should have written less and let the fact that nothing was fucking happening to those polls sit there for itself, but the void of movement left me trying to fill it by talking myself into shit that, with any amount of reflection, was bullshit.

The void is the worst thing for the media, because it gets filled with bullshit from people trying to find something to fill the space. Why did Jordan Peterson rise to prominence in mainstream circles as a critic of trans people and their pronouns? Because with reporting dollars slashed across the board and the culture war alive and well, “U of T Prof In Hot Water” was an easy story to report, and because it hit the culture wars at just the right time – just when North Carolina was passing their bathroom bill, pushing trans rights to a new frontier of awareness. It filled a void.

What is the news value of a “status quo, Pierre is still clearly going to win this leadership” story (other than that it accurately reflects the current overwhelming truth)? Nothing – it doesn’t get anybody anything. The dream of a piece like the one the Post ran – not a newser, but an analysis piece – is for it to pop, for it to dominate the news discussion for a day or two, and for other media to respond to it. Maybe the writer gets invited onto Power and Politics or Power Play, maybe they get on David Herle’s podcast, whatever. Done properly, it is supposed to drive the coverage decisions of other people, and by being the ones to report it, keep getting your paper and your writer’s name coming out of other people’s mouths as free publicity.

You know what doesn’t drive Power and Politics booking choices? “Nothing to see here”, but right now, there isn’t.

Poilievre is easily winning this leadership right now and the idea he isn’t is mostly just the fiction of his opponents and media producers. Don’t buy into their false claims of crisis.