Poilievre's Youth Surge? Not So Fast
On A Crosstab Of Everything And Nothing
It’s become a bit of a trend recently to opine on the recent Abacus Data poll, which had the CPC winning the youth vote, and because of it, there’s been a lot of discourse about the appeal Pierre Poilievre has to younger, disaffected voters who have been locked out of the housing market and are looking desperately for something, anything that might allow them to get on the housing market, or at least into a more comfortable spot in life. And in so doing, most commentators are making a cardinal mistake – this isn’t about Poilievre, and almost exclusively about Jagmeet Singh leading a party for no one.
The NDP is a marriage of two very different kinds of people, and the commentariat mostly doesn’t want to admit this fact – they’re a weird amalgamation of socially liberal hipsters who think that social issues, especially around Gay and Trans rights, are some of the most pressing issues in society, and a working class, culturally conservative, economically liberal base who think that the obsession with pronouns is a distraction from the real issues of class solidarity. It’s a marriage of working class high school graduates who think the NDP will help them against corporate malfeasance and socially liberal rich kids who view the NDP as an acceptable home for the voters who care more about the soft, social issues. And the problem is, Jagmeet Singh is trying to be the leader for both wings, and in so doing, is the leader for nobody.
I am not here to argue about the moral efficacy of a party designed around supporting socially liberal views that argues that the Liberals aren’t sufficiently supportive of racial minorities and the LGBT+ community, but merely to make the following point about its practical utility – if the NDP becomes that party, it will bleed votes to the Tories. If the NDP were to become a party solely of the working class, regardless of their view on social issues, they’d win a lot of potential Tory voters – and they’d do so at the cost of many Orange-Red swing voters.
The reasons for this is simple – there are a lot of voters who agree with one of the NDP’s two main planks – either anti-corporatists who want a more redistributive economic model or members of various protected classes who want the NDP to stand up for them – but don’t like the other part of the agenda. We know this from the US, where right-trending voters in places like Arkansas and the Florida panhandle are more likely to support left wing economic ideas, like minimum wage increases, than they are to vote for Democratic nominees, and where left-trending voters in Kansas vote more for abortion rights than they do for Democrats. It’s a very simple problem to identify, but it’s a lot harder to know what to do with the diagnosis.
The NDP’s “solution” has been to do nothing, because the NDP has no solution to anything and no way to come up with a coherent vision for anything. After an Ontario election result where the party got hammered in working class havens for them, they’ve gone for some low hanging fruit of corporate bashing, but it’s still hamfisted and mostly relegated to Twitter, because the NDP has no money to try and do events or things, and they have no strategy to use their friendly media outlet (The Star) to front run their policies.
If there’s nothing else about Poilievre, he’s been really, really good at using friendly media (National Post) to defend and promote his agenda, and proliferate the talking points of his arguments. I’m not saying everyone there supports him, or is taking cues from him, but there is a media apparatus that is helping to promote the Conservatives. The NDP’s unwillingness to cultivate the same from The Star and even the National Observer is fucking insanity, because without it the NDP will fail, or more accurately, continue to fail.
The problem with predictions of Poilievre continuing to do this well with young voters is like 27 fold, but let’s limit it to the main problems. First, it’s one poll – the Conservatives are at 20% of the 18-29 vote in the Redacted Paywall Pollster’s most recent sample – and just because there is a theoretical opening doesn’t mean it has happened. (In the same breath, the CPC not having broken through with young voters yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen soon.) From there, we can point out that it’s three years away from the likeliest next election date, that the Liberals have three years to come up with an answer on housing, and that the NDP could get their act together (I know, I know, but they could), but let’s just get to the real meat of it – Poilievre is being graded on a curve right now.
In a leadership election this far out, the candidates don’t have to have strong, detailed policies, it’s about vague sense of directions. If you think this is a criticism, it’s explicitly not – crafting firm commitments for 2022 when the next election is years away is very dumb and bad, as Keir Starmer found when he made 10 pledges to win the Labour leadership he now is choosing to walk back from. We don’t want an increase in bullshit pledges that fall apart because they’re made too far in advance of events, so it’s fine to judge these candidates on a curve.
That said, Poilievre gets some credit for saying the word housing a bunch – and it’s good he’s doing so! – but that level of vagueness won’t cut it in 2025. He will need a housing answer better than “we need to build more homes near transit lines”, but right now, just putting housing on the list and saying young voters have been fucked by the housing market is enough to engender a hearing from young voters. It won’t be enough to actually get them to vote for someone whose historic views on economics are to cut spending and focus on corporate welfare and who has a decidedly mixed set of views on the suite of social issues that, on the whole, Gen Z is much more liberal than even Millennials on. For that, for them to actually pull the trigger at the ballot box, requires a lot more.
The other thing missing from this is that so much of the commentariat is willing to accrue the Poilievre-led CPC the benefits of his distinctive change in Conservative tone – which, I agree will be beneficial in areas – while assuming he can bank on all of the O’Toole coalition. That assumption is … well, one I wouldn’t make, to be charitable. There is a political advantage to be gained from Poilievre in some places. There will be an electoral price to pay in others. Might he win some younger voters? Sure. A policy more favourable to renters and prospective homebuyers will necessarily take money out of the pockets of people who bought 20 years ago. There are tradeoffs.
Can Poilievre get a youth revolution going for the CPC? Maybe, but not likely. But even if he does, there’s no guarantee the trade he’d make to get it would be worth it.