Polling Roundup: Pick Up A Hobby Cause Nothing’s Happening

Please Calm Down, I Beg

There have been 9 polls released on Monday - the three trackers, MQO, Angus Reid, Research Co, Pollara, EKOS, and Ipsos. The combined impact on my Ontario polling average of those 9 polls was a 0.2% swing to the Conservatives.

Those represented 5 of the 6 most favourable Ontario samples, by the way, and the polls that had the biggest likelihood of swinging right were those polls. It’s a lot likelier to see a four point swing right when your baseline is a 16% lead than a 7% lead, and despite having a lot of points to defend (to steal the Tennis term), the Liberals have defended most of their most vulnerable points. Oh, and it’s highly likely given Mainstreet’s weekend sample that’s going to roll off tonight was so strong for the CPC, they’re likely going to swing left tomorrow too. So the position is stable.

If the Conservatives want to win this election they need to gain significant seats in Ontario. They’re going backwards in Ontario right now. They’re in deep, deep shit. Everything else - Atlantic Canada, Quebec, BC, and longshot hopes in the Prairies - is all irrelevant to the question of whether Pierre Poilievre can become PM if Ontario doesn’t move. That's only relevant to whether it becomes a Liberal majority or minority. If Ontario doesn’t move it’s the end of Poilievre, and the rest is just playing out the string.

Now, the rest is pretty interesting, but let’s be clear about what the slippage in my model has been in the last week or so as it’s gone from the dizzying heights of 200 to 190 - it’s been seats the Liberals have no business winning anyways. It’s been 2 Calgarys and 2 Kelownas and Bay Of Quinte and Kildonan-St. Paul’s and Mirimachi and Cumberland-Colchester and Beauport and Saint Jean. None of those seats should go red and frankly if you are feeling some kind of way about the national race because I now have Blue Kelowna, please scream into a pillow instead of bothering me about it.

What’s happened is the Liberals have bled some of the unsustainably big vote shares they were never going to win, like 35% in Alberta or 40% in SaskyToba, for more reasonable and more likely outcomes. Sure, that means it’s likely 3 Alberta seats at most and Winnipeg West is the only CPC seat the Liberals gain (aside from the redistribution gain of the Northern Sasky seat), but any path to majority government that needed those gains were never real. In the same way, the 2 Kelownas and some of the other ambitious Liberal targets in BC like Abbotsford or Pitt Meadows in BC are nice to haves as well. If they lose those this week, and they tip to a 185 seat projection by election day, that’s fine.

What is more concerning is Quebec, where there’s been some real movement. They’re down 4 seats from their peak here, losing Beauport to the Conservatives and Berthier, Saint Jean, and La Pointe-Ile to the Bloc. The polling average is down to a 14.7% Liberal lead, down from a peak of 20%. The newer data is split, with Ipsos showing the lead increasing, a few showing essentially no change, Mainstreet showing a huge drop but still a 8% lead, and Angus Reid causing everyone to lose their shit with a 2% lead.

Now, it’s possible that Nanos and Liaison are missing a trend and that Leger and Pallas will show a single digits race when they come in the field this week, but that’s not at all guaranteed. Even more than anywhere else, Quebec moves at its own pace. The idea that anything is locked in because Angus fucking Reid says so in Quebec is nonsense. But more importantly it underplays how safe some of the Liberal gains in Quebec still are. If the Liberal lead was to go down another 5% on average, they’d lose 5 seats - which would leave them with 39 seats, a net four seat gain in Quebec off the last election or a third of the way to majority government. That’s not at all a bad thing, when there are gains on the table in Ontario and notably BC. And that’s arguably the worst case scenario.

There’s this horrible rush from English Canada to over interpret Quebec, to try and find capital-R Reasons for everything that happens there. Every crosstab must mean something, in a way that we never treat wonky BC tabs the same way. Sometimes it’s wonkiness. Now, there has been movement, but you’d be kidding yourselves if there’s been some big event that’s caused this huge tsunami of Liberal support going elsewhere. If there was, we’d be seeing a huge fuss being made in Quebec’s press, like we did with the English debate question in 2021. The reason that became a story was in part the total saturation of that moment in the Quebec news as the campaign story the final week. I’m not a diligent reader of every Quebecor broadsheet, but I’m not sensing anything there. Yes, Blanchet was deemed to have done well at the debate, and he’s probably benefitting from that. But the idea that we’re now locked into minority governance is for the birds.

The big numbers and the optimism has led to a situation where Liberals are plainly overreacting to small moves that were inevitable this whole time. It’s psychotic how people are reacting and proof that social media has been a mistake, despite the opportunities I’ve gained because of it. There is no crisis, merely a small reversion. And the thing is, if 2015 is the guide, there’s going to be some weird results. If strategic voting is as strong as it seems, maybe the Conservatives lose seats currently expected to go Blue. Maybe the LPC will be stronger in southwestern and eastern Ontario than expected and flip CPC seats that are tariff exposed and/or civil servant heavy. That’s far likelier than a huge polling miss.

The honest truth is that people don’t like the fact that this is now real, and they’re scared. Well sure, this election has a lot of stakes. But there’s nothing in the data that suggests a Conservative government is anything other than a fever dream, and they’re running out of time. Calm the fuck down