Election Writ 3/31: Liberals keep ticking up in the polls
Seat projection approaches 200 seats for the Carney Liberals.
It was a good bet at the beginning of the year that a party would win over 200 seats in the 2025 federal election — as long as you didn’t have to specify which party you were talking about.
It was another strong day for the Liberals in the polls as the consensus moves above the 40% threshold. Looking at the eight pollsters that have polled since the writ drop and dropping the highest and lowest results gives the Liberals a range of between 41% and 45% support, followed by the Conservatives between 35% and 39% and the NDP between 7% and 11%. While there are some differences between these results, the divergence is well within a reasonable range.
The Poll Tracker now puts the gap between the Liberals and the Conservatives at 4.5 percentage points, the widest it has been so far.
The New Democrats appear to have hit their floor around 9% and the Conservatives have been holding steady with ticks up and down around the 37% to 38% mark over the last week. But it remains an open question what the ceiling is for the Liberals.
Regionally, the party continues to make progress in key battlegrounds. The Liberals now (marginally) lead in British Columbia by two points, in Ontario by seven points, in Quebec by 16 points (over the Bloc) and in Atlantic Canada by 21 points. These numbers are more than enough to give the Liberals a solid majority government.
The seat projection now awards the Liberals between 172 and 211 seats, meaning they are at or above the threshold for a majority government in the likely range (the maximum range, which takes into account a big error in the polls and/or the model still has some overlap between the Liberals and Conservatives).
With a best-guess of 197 seats, the Liberals are knocking on the door of 200. The reasons for this are simple. With the movement we’ve seen in British Columbia, the Liberals are well-positioned to sweep nearly all of the NDP’s seats in the Lower Mainland and in the south of Vancouver Island. In addition, the Bloc Québécois is losing ground to the Liberals in Quebec. Unlike in 2015, the Liberals do not have to worry about the NDP. The Conservatives also have a low seat ceiling in Quebec. As a result, every drop the Bloc suffers in the polls adds a few more seats to the Liberal tally.
The trendline today suggests that things are still shifting toward the Liberals (the Nanos Research, Mainstreet and Liaison daily trackers all have the Liberals up a point or two and a new Ipsos has them up as well) and that they are on track for their best performance since 1980. But unlike that result 45 years ago, there doesn’t seem to be the same regional divide in Liberal support.