Election Writ 4/1: Liberals hit 200 seats
The gap between the Liberals and Conservatives continues to widen.
(I guess the April Fools’ joke is on me — I mistakenly sent this out to subscribers as being the 3/31 edition!)
While it wasn’t a great day on the campaign trail for Mark Carney (more on that later), it was a great polling day for the Liberals.
And now the party is projected to win more than 200 seats in the Poll Tracker.
It’s just the latest development in what has been a remarkable few weeks of transformation in Canadian public opinion. It was the Conservative Party that was on track to win more than 200 seats just two months ago. Now, it’s the Liberal Party that could pass that threshold — something the Liberals have never done throughout their storied history.
The projected seat range for the Liberals runs from 180 to 214 seats, so getting to the 200-seat mark would by no means be a certainty if the election were held today. But with the shift in the polls that has continued over the last few days the odds that anything but a Liberal victory could be produced out of these numbers have become vanishingly slim. The Conservatives are now projected to have only a 2% chance of winning the most seats. The tables have certainly turned.
The daily trackers from Nanos Research, Liaison Strategies and Mainstreet Research showed little change this morning, but they all had the Liberals up one point. The Conservatives were also up one point in two of the three trackers (they were stable in the other). It must be frustrating in Conservative HQ to see that their polling numbers are holding up just fine, or perhaps even improving a little, while their chances of winning keep falling.
The reason for that (as I’ve said multiple times already) is because of the weakness of the New Democrats and, increasingly, the Bloc Québécois. The polls published in the last 24 hours hammer that point home.