Polling, Provincial Results, And Lies We Tell Ourselves

On Pathetic Defences

This weekend has seen hockey prove why it’s truly the dumbest sport ever, with a member of the Ottawa Senators scoring an empty net goal and then getting cross-checked to the head by Morgan Reilly for it. The plays shows the complete absurdity of the sport, its culture, and the whole unwritten “code” that Ridly Grieg allegedly broke. It’s also not great that a lot of media members who really should know better think a cross-check to the back of the head is acceptable, but I digress.

(Actually, fuck it, let’s do this quickly; we spent the beginning of last week decrying hockey’s fucked up culture when it came to an alleged gang rape by the 2018 World Junior team, but the idea that we should hold anyone to higher standards in this specific instance of someone losing their mind and resorting to needless violence is somehow controversial. I get that the boomers and the CTE-riddled ex-players can’t get this through their heads. If you have a functioning brain, do better.)

I keep thinking about this in part because it’s just really fucking wild to see people defend Reilly and because his suspension hasn’t been announced yet, but I’m also thinking about it in the context of a newly-formed talking point I keep seeing from left wing poll denialists. (Yes, my brain is fucked, I’m aware.) This strand of thinking goes that because (some combination of) Wab Kinew won and the Newfoundland Liberals flipped a NL PC seat and the Sask NDP have a lead in one poll and Rachel Notley gained seats in May 2023 and David Eby’s still leading the federal polls are wrong.

That it’s nonsense almost goes without saying, but why I think about the Leafs/Sens fight is that there is a reasonable argument to be made that people are just skipping in service of the insane. Should Morgan Reilly have done something to show his displeasure with Grieg? Sure. Did he have to cross-check the back of his fucking head? No. In the same way, there’s a fucking hole the size of the Prairies wide to drive down between “the polls are fake, Trudeau is still winning” and “a February 2024 Abacus poll proves Poilievre will win 220 seats at the next election, and yet some on the left still manage to fuck it up.

…

The correlation between provincial results and the party in power nationally is weak at best. The famed Ontario example is mostly a gift of either timing or luck, but even then it’s not nearly as robust as it seems. In 1993, 2004, and 2015 the LPC won federal office with a left-wing Ontario government. In Quebec, the Liberals lost in their first election under both Chretien and Trudeau, but they also won office again under Chretien in 2003 (and the reason they lost in 1994 was because of Mulroney anyways). Outside of those two provinces, it’s even less correlated.

BC had 16 years of centre-right government under both LPC and CPC governments, the Saskatchewan Party has won under both, and if you can find much of a Federal pattern in how the Atlantic provinces swing between governments you’re smarter than me. Why did the Newfoundland Liberals gain a seat? They ran a well known news anchor and radio host in the open seat in the part of the country where candidate effects matter most. Why did Wab Kinew win? Because he ran a good campaign against a government that presided over a collapsing health care system and focused more on culture wars than governance.

David Eby’s holding up fine in the polls, but he gets to run against a football team/political party in BC FC that is too busy fighting itself and the BC Conservatives to actually oppose it. Rachel Notley won 44% of the vote in Alberta, which is a thing you only do by getting something at least 10 points from people who voted CPC in 2021 and given both the LPC and federal NDP are down in Alberta since 2021 in the polls, closer to 15 points from people who will vote for Poilievre.

You know what Fred Hutton, Wab Kinew, and David Eby have to do with Justin Trudeau? Fuck all. You know how we know this? John Tory lost a 2009 byelection as PCPO leader and absolutely no one declared it good news for Michael Ignatieff. Nobody talked about the terrible 2013 Ontario Liberal byelection results as a boon for Stephen Harper that proved he was on track to win again. Remember the great crisis for Trudeau when the OLP lost Scarborough Rouge River in 2016 and how that would auger a one term government? Oh, wait.

Let’s paint a hypothetical for you, eh? It’s 2028, or 2032, or some period 18 months out from an election. Pierre Poilievre or some other Conservative we all hate is PM. The polls are looking good, even great, for the left, but Kinew and Eby’s governments have hit midterm malaise and there’s a few bad byelection results for the left. Do you know what you’d say if right wingers tried to use some rando byelections in places you’ve barely heard of to try and claim Poilievre is actually fine? The answer sure as fuck wouldn’t be “this is a fair argument that we should take seriously”, that’s for sure.

This is an idiot’s argument that uses the veil of stats and facts to look less insane. It is hard enough to use Federal byelections as a usable datapoint to project future elections, let alone fucking random provincial ones. Every poll shows the Liberals getting whipped. There’s no secret set of data that shows the polls are all a conspiracy.

Will Poilievre win 220 seats or some such landslide? Almost assuredly not, but that’s not really saying much. I don’t think any – or at least many – Conservatives genuinely think the number of Liberals at the next election will actually be under 100. They might hope for it, they might wish for it, but in the same way that I wrote for months that just because Notley was projecting for a majority at that moment, doesn’t mean she’d get there in the end.

Could I be wrong and Poilievre does get the landslide? Who the fuck knows, but it’s a falsifiable prediction based on a consistent belief (incumbents generally recover as elections near). That’s not a guarantee I’ll be right but it’s a belief that you can have an actual argument about. This conspiracist nonsense is just ludicrous, in part because there’s no central claim. Is it that the polls are inventing a Tory lead entirely, and there’s actually a secret pro-Trudeau plurality? Is it that they’re exaggerating the Tory lead? No one making these claims has anything other than “but what about these unrelated results”, because there’s nothing to have.

Do you not think if there was a way to be doing Trudeau hopium right now I’d be doing it? Like, let’s be honest about who you’re reading right now. If there was any form of argument that Trudeau wasn’t in deep, deep shit right now I’d have written it by now. I’m not because it doesn’t exist. Maybe the Liberals will put in a better than expected in Durham and we’ll get another round of “polls and byelections don’t align”, but let’s not kid ourselves. Every viable metric right now says the same fucking thing. I hate it, but it's true.

There’s a very reasonable case to be made that the polls right now might be reflective of the current reality, but not predictive of the 2025 election. I’m pretty sure if you got David Coletto drunk right now he’d agree that the Liberals likely get more than 24% of the vote on Election Day, whenever that is. But that’s not the same thing as the sheer insanity some of you are willing to engage with in the name of denying reality. Again, if the roles were reversed, the screams of mis- (and dis-)information would be loud. Hell, we saw in December how the Federal polls were a conspiracy against the left but the Leger poll that showed the NB Liberals leading was cheered as God’s truth. Funny, that, except this isn’t funny as much as it’s pathetic.

The Liberals are in the same amount of trouble whether you want to admit it or not. My advice? Admit it, and try and pressure the party to get their heads out of their fucking asses. Pretending everything’s fine only ends one way – you looking just as fucking stupid as these assholes defending a cross-check to the head because Ridly Grieg raised his stick too high before scoring.