Election Writ 3/25: Liberals grow as NDP collapses
A series of new polls put the Liberals over 40% and the NDP under 10%.
The question that was asked most often heading into this election was whether or not the Liberals could really sustain their momentum. Surely, as Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet said, what goes up must come down.
But it seems that the Liberals might not be done with the ‘up’ part just yet.
A series of new polls suggest the Liberals are expanding their lead over the Conservatives and are cresting the threshold of 40% support. This does not come at the expense of the Conservatives, however, but rather the New Democrats.
In my Poll Tracker, the Liberals are now just under that 40% mark, having gained two points (a huge gain in an average!) since yesterday’s update. The Conservatives, however, are holding at 37%. Instead, it’s the NDP that continues to slide. The party is now at 10% support in the Poll Tracker which, considering the polls that were published yesterday, might flatter it.
The Liberals are now projected to win 183 seats, with 130 going to the Conservatives. The Bloc has slipped again to 24 seats while the New Democrats are down to just four.
You can see in the chart above that there is no longer any overlap, at least in the likely ranges, between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The Liberal floor stands at 158 seats while the Conservative ceiling is at 153. The NDP’s range tops out at just six seats. If the New Democrats are going to avoid that kind of disaster, they will either need to turn their numbers around or hope that a few of their incumbent MPs can carry the load themselves.
The Poll Tracker average is still a little slow moving in the early days of the campaign. Voters are just starting to tune-in. But if we continue to see more of the numbers we saw yesterday, then the Liberals have not yet hit their ceiling in the projections and the NDP has not yet hit its floor.
Let’s get into some of those numbers from yesterday and this morning.