Would A 10% Swing Save The Conservatives?

Questions To Which The Answer Is No

There has been a lot of polling discourse in recent days, and all of it has been terrible. Smart people outside of the political arena are saying idiotic things, talking about momentum that doesn’t exist or ignoring basic math, while morons pretend they know more about the state of the race than Kory Teneycke and Doug Ford. It’s the time of the election that compares well to a high profile trial, in that people who actually know what they’re talking about are suddenly dwarfed by the opinions of those who don’t do the work. In the way that lawyers must despise being lectured at about court cases from people whose most recent legal education is Suits, it’s really fucking annoying seeing terrible polling takes from people who think Angus Fucking Reid is biased towards the Liberals.

But, it’s worth engaging with them in one way - the government has had a couple of polls “tighten” in recent days, as Angus Reid and Ipsos went from L+10 and L+12 respectively to L+6. Both now see 10 point Liberal leads in Ontario, which is more believable than the 16 and 20 point leads of their previous polls, which is notable in the same way that losing by 7 goals and then the next game losing by 2 is notable. The Conservatives are still losing and losing by a lot. But what if that changed?

Using my model, I decided to have some fun and apply a uniform 5% drop in the Liberal vote and a 5% pop rise in the Conservative vote across the country. Now, swing won’t be uniform, but my model has already built in non-uniformity in a way that I’m content with, and I think such an approach handles the edge cases properly. Or, at least, they cancel out - this approach would have South Surrey White Rock blue, but Surrey Centre red, and while it’s possible those would invert, that doesn’t matter for the topline.

And the Conservatives are still fucked.

Such an approach would see the Liberals win 168 seats, which is 4 short of majority government and would enable the NDP to hold the balance of power. Given the lack of money, leader, and infrastructure a 9 seat NDP would face, the Liberals would still be in a great position to take advantage of that and govern essentially unchallenged for a while. No, it wouldn’t be a majority, but it would still be above the wildest dreams of any of us two months ago.

The trouble for the Conservatives is that they’d need another 14 gains just to get to parity, and even then it’s nip and tuck who the Bloc would choose. They’d get more seats for every point gained the further they went, sure, but again a 10% swing wouldn’t do them much good except tip them into minority - but, maybe even not, if the renewed sense of strategic voting saves a few of the Liberal incumbents with 10%+ NDP votes in places like Niagara or Hamilton.

This also assumes that the Liberals fall in Quebec too, where the evidence is clearer that there hasn’t been any movement and where the very very very very very I cannot tell you just how very limited evidence we have (the three tracking polls) is that Tout Le Monde En Parle did no damage. The Liberals are back above 43% in my average after a brief dip into the 42s, which is not statistically significant but is fun.

Those trying to come up with novel theories of momentum or whatever do so at their peril, because the reality is not only are the Conservatives not winning now they’re not even remotely close to winning. They need a big swing, and they need it to be efficient too. And it’s not.

Mainstreet’s shown the complete uselessness of national polling numbers, because the reason their national vote has moved rightward is mostly an erosion of the Liberal vote in the west, which let’s be real, was never going to hold up. The reason I have avoided writing about the Liberal chances in BC or Alberta as some big targets is because I plainly don’t think they’re real - we’re not winning 5 or 6 seats in Alberta, we’re not actually winning Kelowna, it’s always been fanciful. And now their polling shows that it is.

The just dropped IRG had a 1% swing to the CPC nationally but the only region where the swing was sizable was BC, where the Cons retook the lead. Ontario was still 44-38 for the Liberals, and Quebec saw the Bloc gain one point off the LPC and the CPC lose a point. That’s the kind of movement that doesn’t do fuck all for the CPC.

What they need is to break through in Ontario but they can’t. Where they’re making their gains is often in places without a seat haul attached to it. Poilievre’s doing really well in Quebec, and will probably get a high water mark in popular vote and maybe even seats, but again, not exactly helping the vote efficiency here. The Conservatives are in real fucking trouble of an even less “fair” result by popular vote standards if the current trend of bigger Liberal “losses” are concentrated in the places where the Liberals have the least to lose.

I know I keep harping on this but again, a 10% swing on margin from the Liberals to the Conservatives would still result in more Liberal MPs than at the 2021 election. The Conservatives are in a horrible spot and they’re running out of time. No amount of bad tweets about momentum will change that.

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