Should We Believe The Carney Polling?

On Carney’s Shockingly Good Polls

Does Michael Ignatieff qualify as a Canadian success?

Ignatieff, of course, is a born and raised Canadian who went on to great success in academia - he was a professor at Harvard, a writer and public intellectual for many places, and then came back and served as Liberal Leader and Opposition leader. By any metric that’s a successful life. But, take aside the political career coda at the end - does Ignatieff qualify as a Canadian success?

Canadians tend to be rather proud of our countrymen who leave and only occasionally come back - Michael J Foc is a Canadian legend despite the fact it appears he’s lived in the US since the early 80s, and nobody begrudges him that fact. To the extent anybody has problems with Ryan Reynolds, it would be his … troubling decisions, shall we say (a plantation wedding? Really?), but when he was nearly co-owner of the Senators we all swooned. We understand that sometimes our talents leave, and we don’t really mind.

The thing about Ignatieff is he never really came back, until he needed something from Canada. He wasn’t a Canadian until he needed to be. I’m thinking of this distinction in the context of Mark Carney, who of course also left Canada and came back, and the key differences between them. I’m especially thinking about this because of Leger’s poll yesterday - the best pollster in Canada, or at least one of the very best, has it as a national tie with Mark Carney as the LPC leader. And in trying to figure out what it means and how real it is, the distinction of being a Canadian success, and a successful person who happens to be Canadian, seems like a good thread to pull at.

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If you take the polls in their default statuses - whether prompting for Trudeau’s Liberals, no leader, or some version of “New Leader”, my model has them on 123 seats, to the Conservatives’ 170. That’s a minority parliament, albeit one where the Conservatives would command 49% of the seats and be generally understood as the clear winner, whatever the actual constitutional questions.

Under a flat three poll average of Angus Reid, Leger, and Pallas’ Carney-as-Leader polling, my model spits out 144 seats, and a Parliament where any notion of “legitimacy” or a “right to govern” is nullified by the fact that the Bloc would be the ones choosing the government. It would also be a Parliament where being on the opposition benches wouldn’t be that bad, in the way that losing the 1979 Federal election and the 2012 Quebec election led to Liberal majorities shortly thereafter. But that’s a 21 seat jump with Carney, eating away at all three other parties, and it’s entirely probable that that projection is low on Carney’s potential, since I’m including Angus Reid data from January, before the huge momentum towards the Liberals started. (That Angus Reid poll came out the same week as Leger’s late January 18% CPC lead that’s now down to 9% - it feels safe to say there’s been a swing since.)

So, why is Carney doing so much better? It’s hard to know. It’s possible it’s a statistical blip, an anti-Trudeau honeymoon, an artifact of polling literally anybody else in Trudeau’s spot, but that’s hard to reconcile. Chrystia Freeland isn’t getting this bump - she polls worse in Leger than a Trudeau-led Liberal Party does, she only polls 1% higher than the Trudeau Liberals in Leger’s Quebec full poll (Carney polls 9% higher), and Frank Graves has tweeted that the Conservatives are in majority territory in a test against Freeland and it’s a Liberal minority when prompting for Carney. Such a big delta between Carney and Freeland kills the idea that Carney is polling well simply because he’s not Trudeau.

Do Canadians have some huge Carneymania? Probably not, but the thing about Conservatives or Carney-sceptics on the right is that you were the ones who consistently claimed Poilievre’s great polls were because Canadians appreciated his specific positions and views, and wasn’t merely a function of the fact that he wasn’t Trudeau. It seems likely that Carney is benefitting from a general sense of competence, fuzzy details about what he’s actually done, and happiness he’s not Justin Trudeau and not somebody who has worked with Justin Trudeau in government as a Minister or in any formal, official capacity.

There is also the fact that, to some extent, viability begets viability. Confidence breeds confidence, whether it’s in politics or sports. Think about the number of times where some bullshit goal that deflects on three defenders before going in is what it takes for someone to score 8 goals in 6 games. Seeing one putt go in can sometimes lead to an avalanche. And yes, having some amount of hope and optimism matters - politics in Canada are dynamic, and getting Liberals to not want to kill themselves matters when voter turnout is a dynamic variable.

Are the Carney-as-leader numbers probably juiced in some way? A little, maybe, but it’s not like asking about Justin Trudeau is somehow a neutral option. The answer, as unsatisfying as it is, is that there’s no objectively correct way to poll a party with an interim leader - be it a party whose old leader is staying in an interim capacity (Trudeau, Scheer from December 2019 to August 2020, Mulcair for like 18 months, etc) or a party led by a distinct interim (Rona Ambrose’s CPC, Bob Rae’s LPC, John Fraser’s OLP twice, etc). If you name Trudeau, you’re likely on some level reducing the LPC vote by reminding people of a person they don’t like. If you prompt for “New Leader”, it’s a mystery box that people can project their feelings and preferences onto. If you prompt for Carney you face a lot of people making a guess about him with less certain information about what kind of leader he’ll actually be.

It’s a great 400 level Quantitative Research Methods debate topic but it’s unknowable. Is a 9% deficit under a Trudeau ballot test better or worse than a hypothetical “New Leader” CPC+4? Nobody knows. It’s impossible to, which is why the details matter less than the stampede to the same general area. But that it’s happening is what actually matters, and it’s fascinating that it is.

I think it’s possible - and I have no data to back this up and no way to even plausibly prove or disprove this if I had an unlimited research budget - but there is a line between a Canadian Success and a success who happens to be Canadian. There are Canadians we claim as One Of Us, and ones that we don’t really feel comfortable with. It’s possible - possible - that the attacks against Carney as some sort of Globalist Elite Banker are failing in part because being a global success isn’t viewed as inherently bad. Carney isn’t obviously a carpetbagger and didn’t only came back to run. And that’s probably enough for the country.

The Carney polls show there is a viable, credible path forward to a fourth term for the Liberals. That's not the same thing as a guarantee, or even that it’s likely, but Carney is a serious threat to Conservatives. That they’re reacting so badly to him shows they know it.