With 18 months to the next election, it’s safe to say that we are in the worst time of basically any Parliament. This Parliament is, unlike the last two federal ones, much more normal. The government’s polling is down, the Opposition’s up, and the question is whether the lead will hold.
Obviously, Pierre Poilievre’s got a (much) bigger lead than, say, Ed Miliband did at the start of 2014 or Bill Shorten had at the start of 2018 or Tim Hudak had in 2010, but in general the strokes of the discourse are the same. The polls are bad for the government, they’re trying to undo them, and every announcement the government makes gets praised or dismissed on whether or not it leads to a poll surge immediately.
It is perfectly reasonable to point out when a political party is looking like they’re headed to a landslide defeat, and right now Justin Trudeau is heading for one. It’s true, but also copium, to point out that governments have come back from big deficits before to win. It’s the same as saying that it’s a bad thing the Leafs go up 4-1 in a game – yes, they have blown that lead famously in the past, but you’d still rather be up 3 goals than not, and the vast majority of the time a 4-1 lead holds.
The thing is, this period in the Parliament will probably be one of the most exciting, but also most boring. The government will try and make a lot of announcements designed to boost the economy, start to fix the housing crisis, and try and reverse the polls. The opposition will decry a lot of these measures as communism while facing scrutiny to reveal actual, detailed plans of their own. It’s possible they may even drop a plan or two themselves. And the third party will try and get attention in increasingly stupid ways because they’re mad they don’t get any coverage.
And while it’ll be fun to (over)-react if some pollster not named Nanos shows a Liberal resurgence, we’re at the stage of the Parliament where four words really do dictate all, and should serve as a reminder that we know much less about things will be by the election. The Beat Goes On.
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Between now and the next election here, there’ll be good weeks for the government and bad weeks. In the US right now, Biden’s been on a run of good form, closing his gap to Trump by a couple of points since the depths of winter and 3 points in the NYT/Siena poll (the one whose Trump +4 poll earlier led to the consternation of all consternations at the height of the “should they dump Biden” discourse). I’m sure there’ll be another set of twists and turns – no way that Biden just consistently gains 1.5% or whatever a month indefinitely. But there’s gonna be good weeks and bad, and at the end of the day the campaign will go on.
I am somewhat open to the argument that there’s no need to focus on polling outside of writ periods or imminent writs, but here’s the thing – there’s a reason the one thing newspapers can’t drop is polling. I frequently lament the state of provincial polling in this country as insufficient, but it’s a very good thing that Postmedia, the Star, and CBC Calgary pay for more polling now than they did 5 years ago. It is, because it’s not a good thing if voters are uninformed.
If not for the great poll collapse of 2023, do you think we’d be having the huge amount of housing announcements that we have seen up to now? Do you think Doug Ford would have reversed course on the Greenbelt if his polls hadn’t gone down 7 points in a couple of months? Do you think it’s a good thing that progressive voters not know who the best option is, in the many cases it’s unclear?
Imagine how much worse our understanding of BC politics would be if we were unable to independently see that the BC Conservatives were more than a rump party for PPCers. It’s quite clear that Kevin Falcon’s rebrand to BC FC has killed the centre-right and is allowing for voters to have a better, clearer sense of the state of play. If the election ends up being close, as Liaison suggested last week, it’s possible Greens voters or moderate, federal Liberals who prefer BC FC provincially, may swing to the NDP to stop the insurgent Cons. I’m not saying that will happen, but it’s better that those voters have that info.
Right now, we are in an information environment where things are bad for the government. In 2015, I cut class to go canvass for the Liberals, and as I took a bus from campus to Ottawa West Nepean, the Globe’s famous “we endorse the Tories but not Stephen Harper” endorsement dropped. Bad information environments have elected this government three times on the bounce. What is needed is for people to focus less on the day to day of a bad headline, a bad tweet, a misleading op-ed, and focus more on articulating a Liberal message.
The problem with this is that that statement will inevitably be described by those willing to read my words in bad faith as letting it go unchallenged, but it’s not that. If you’re defending yourself on an issue set that is what the Tories and their media allies want you fighting on, they’ve won. If a presidential election is fought on immigration being bad, the GOP will win, no matter how many times Democrats try and say that they have more humane and better solutions. The way you win in politics is not to use your bully pulpit to correct the record of every lie your opposition espouses, but to signal your own message that doesn’t make it seem like the opposition is setting the news agenda.
The Liberals might get blown out, and they might win 125 seats. The notion that this week’s poll proves or doesn’t which it’ll be is nonsensical. Today is Budget Day, and while I’m going to leave most of the policy analysis to others, this could be a key moment where the government is seen not as responding to the Opposition tail wagging the governmental dog, but as making the political weather again.
I make no firm predictions because humility is a virtue, and one that this site has criminally lacked in the ast; just as I never expected the lead to hit nearly 20%, I’ve also been waiting for the British Tories to start the climbback to 28% and 150 seats since Sunak showed up. My instinct is to believe governments can and will rally. This one might, and it might not. But the individual beats will come and go, Nanos will flow into Research Co and Abacus will poll again. The Beat Goes On, forever and ever. Or at least till October 2025.
So you were campaigning for Anita in 2015. Good for you. (I've lived in that riding for 47 years.)
Polls today may well not indicate who wins in a year and a half. But politicians act as if they do. As you point out, the feds would not be acting on housing if it were not for the polls. So polls today turn out to be very important.
But I think that, while polls are informative for politics, they are not informative for policy. They mostly reflect the state of ignorance of those surveyed, and perhaps how to manipulate them. They do not indicate what is the right thing to do for the country (or province, or municipality). That is the whole problem with populism.
The beat goes on, but I don’t think it is business as usual.
A few months ago we were wondering here on this forum when Trudeau and the Liberals would finally start acting on the issues people care about. Well, today’s budget, and all the announcements leading up to it, clearly addresses several issues that people care about. It might be too little too late, but then again, 18 months is a long, long time.