Election Writ 4/17: No knock-out in Round One
Mark Carney survives the French debate. On to the English debate.
Except in the rare cases when an election is truly too close to call, debates really come down to a simple question: did the frontrunner survive or did the challenger(s) do anything to close the gap?
While we’ll have to wait for some data before we can definitively answer that question, to my eye the frontrunner, Mark Carney, did indeed survive the debate. I’m just not sure if the challengers did anything to improve their fortunes.
Also in today’s newsletter: Grading the leaders’ performances in the debate. And what’s the tipping point seat for a Liberal majority?
LATER: I’ll be on CPAC’s pre-debate show at 6:30 PM ET. Tune in!
I thought the debate was quite good, with lots of opportunity for interaction between the leaders and time for them to explain their positions. There were only a few moments when the cross-talk got out of hand. It wasn’t overly superficial or overly nasty and it was ably moderated (once again) by Patrice Roy. The French-language debates over the last few elections have all been quite good. The English-language debates haven’t been good but I’m hopeful that, with a single experienced moderator in Steve Paikin, things will go better tonight than they did the last few times.
(As an aside, the post-debate scrums were, for me, the last straw when it comes to the Leaders’ Debate Commission. I’ve generally been supportive of the idea behind this organization but its track record has been awful. It has used different criteria for participation in each of the three elections in which it has existed and badly handled the Greens this time both in first allowing them to participate on a technicality and then barring them from the debates at the last minute for equally bad reasons. Allowing the post-debate scrums to be flooded by non-journalists asking often ridiculous questions demonstrated yet another lack of judgment on the part of the Commission. The experiment, which I think was a laudable initiative, should be ended after this election.)
Did the French-language debate do anything to change the course of the election, particularly in Quebec? We’ll need to wait a few days to see the polls reflect any real impact. The first (tiny) bits of data we have come from Nanos Research, whose three-day rolling poll included post-debate results from last night.
Their poll this morning shows the Conservatives up 2.4 points in Quebec from yesterday’s three-day roll, while the Liberals are up 1.5 points and the Bloc is down 2.3 points. However, with a sample size of about 250 people the margin of error is nearly seven points for these parties — all of this movement is well-within that margin of error and quite typical for a daily tracker. We’ll have to be patient.
The Poll Tracker continues to show a tightening at the national level with the Liberals dropping down to 43.3%, followed by the Conservatives at 38% and the NDP at 8.5%. The 5.3-point margin between the Liberals and the Conservatives is the smallest gap in the polling average since March 30.
The seat projection hasn’t moved much but the Liberal range is sliding. The Liberals are projected to win 196 seats, with 121 going to the Conservatives, 20 to the Bloc Québécois, five to the NDP and one to the Greens.
The new development in today’s update is that the lower edge of the Liberals’ likely range of seat outcomes is now down to 172 — the threshold for a majority government. The party’s likely floor hasn’t been at that mark since March 31. Accordingly, their odds of winning a majority government have slipped to 81%. The Conservative chances of winning the most seats is up to 6%. That’s obviously very low, but the Conservatives’ chances have been stuck at the 1% to 2% level since the second week of the campaign.
The French-language debate is unlikely to directly impact the Conservatives’ chances of winning. The party is simply not in a position to make many seat gains in Quebec, with the maximum ceiling for the Conservatives in the model being 15 seats — just three more than they are currently projected to win.
Any impact will instead by indirect. As I mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, most of the swing seats in Quebec are Liberal-Bloc contests. If the Bloc rises in Quebec, the Liberals will lose seats in the projection and drop closer to the minority/majority threshold, making it easier for the Conservatives to overtake them. If the Bloc doesn’t rise in Quebec, the path for the Conservatives to win a plurality of seats becomes increasingly narrow to the point of near-impossibility.
So how did the leaders fare? Here’s my subjective assessment. I’ll grade the leaders on two things — first, how they performed in the general sense and, second, whether they achieved their goals for the evening.