Election Writ 4/18: No knock-out in Round Two, either
Poll suggests debate could have little impact on the race
Despite being a livelier contest than the French-language version, the English-language debate appears unlikely to move the dial all that much — at least according to a flash post-debate poll conducted by Abacus Data.
The results of that survey match what were my own impressions. Both Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre performed well and gave plenty of fodder for their own supporters to like. Jagmeet Singh tried to inject himself into the fray as much as possible but struggled to leave a lasting impression. There was no knock-out punch — there rarely is — but there was also nothing I saw that was dramatic enough to move the numbers in a significant way.
Also in today’s newsletter: A look at the (real this time) tipping point seats.
I’ll delve into the Abacus numbers more deeply and compare them to what Abacus found following the 2019 and 2021 English-language debates. That comparison suggests this debate was very different from those two previous ones and that the impact, too, could be very different.
But first, today’s polls have not moved the Poll Tracker significantly. A couple of surveys from EKOS Research put the Liberals ahead by large margins, but the EKOS numbers are no longer significantly out-of-step with the consensus. The Liberal margin is just on the higher end of the current range.
While EKOS finds a 10-point Liberal lead in its IVR and online surveys, Nanos Research shows an (also wide) eight-point lead for the Liberals this morning. Tempering that red wave is a one-point lead registered by Mainstreet Research. While there is a fair amount of divergence between these polls, there is a common thread running between the Mainstreet and Nanos three-day rolling trackers: the Conservatives are down two points in both of these polls compared to where they were three days ago.
The two trackers do not agree, however, on what impact the French-language debate has had on the situation in Quebec. Two-thirds of the Nanos poll is now largely post-debate and, compared to its last pre-debate poll, the Liberals are up three points in Quebec while the Bloc is down three points. While that might seem like a positive trend for the Liberals in the province, Mainstreet’s trendline in Quebec is the complete opposite. The regional results are paywalled, but the publicly-available topline number is clear enough: the Bloc has gone from 4% to 6% nationally over the last two days, a jump that represents significant movement in Quebec. We’ll have to keep an eye on this.
But let’s get into what the Abacus poll shows about what impact the English-language debate will have on the race in the rest of Canada. Fortunately, Abacus did post-debate polling in 2019 and 2021 and asked the same questions as it did after last night’s debate. This allows us to compare apples-to-apples.
The chart below shows the two sets of questions asked by Abacus — what kind of impression the leaders made on people who watched the debate, and who among the leaders did the most to win (or earn) and lose their vote. The results show that both Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre out-performed their predecessors, while Jagmeet Singh had a poor outing compared to his previous two.