Election Writ 4/19: The calm before the storm?
It'll be a little while before we know whether anything has changed.
We’re entering an unusual part of this election campaign — especially when it comes to the polls.
Normally, we’d be starting to have a good indication of what impact the leaders’ debates had on the polls by now and in a couple of days we’d be starting to see some clear trends emerge, if any indeed do emerge.
But this post-debate period is coinciding with the Easter long weekend. Polling over a holiday period is always fraught as people might not be home or as readily available (or interested) to take part in a poll as they would be on a weekday evening or on a normal weekend. Some pollsters also leave the field over a holiday, as Nanos Research appears to have done yesterday, and the news cycle has slowed.
So, it’s a little quiet. But it could get pretty wild over the next few days.
THE NUMBERS: In this week’s members-only episode, we share our reflections on the English-language leaders' debate and whether it will have any impact on the polls. We also go through our projections and discuss some of the big questions we have going into this final week. You can join our Patreon to listen to this episode here. Next Saturday, we’ll do a cross-country tour of our projections!
This long holiday weekend is also coinciding with advance voting, which means that a lot of votes will already be locked-in once pollsters can go back in the field with a little more confidence.
We might have to be even more patient than usual as a result of all this. Not until the middle of this coming week might we have a good idea of what (if anything) has happened to public opinion in the wake of the two leaders’ debates. And, by then, we’ll be only days away from the end of the campaign. Any momentum that a party might be building could carry them through the weekend and leave us trying to capture a moving target right up until election day.
For now, we have only a few numbers to work with — and, again, we have to work with some caution. Liaison Strategies and Mainstreet Research were out this morning with differing results, the former showing the Liberals ahead by five points (44% to 39%) and the latter putting the Conservatives ahead by two points (43% to 41%). Mainstreet has shown better Conservative results throughout this campaign, so it isn’t surprising that they are once again the most bullish on the party.
There is one common thread between these two polls and it is that the Liberals are doing worse than they were three days ago. Liaison has them down two points and Mainstreet has them down three.
These two polls also point toward some movement in Quebec following the French-language debate. While the scale of the movement is very different, both polls are showing the Liberals down and the Bloc Québécois up in the province. It could be that Yves-François Blanchet helped himself in the French-language debate, but Nanos was not picking up the same trendline in its release yesterday. So, à suivre.
Little change in last week
With another week in the books, I thought it would be a good time to look at how things have shifted in the Poll Tracker over the last seven days.
The answer? Not all that much, really.
Nationally, the Liberals have dropped 0.7 points and are leading with 43.6%. The Conservatives are up 0.5 points and trail with 38%, while the New Democrats haven’t budged. They are at the same 8.3% as they were a week ago.
We haven’t seen much movement in most of the country. The margin between the Liberals and the Conservatives has closed by about two points in British Columbia, but the Liberals still lead by just over three points.
The biggest swing has been in Alberta, where the Conservatives have gained four points over the last week, nearly all at the expense of the Liberals. They are down three points. The prospects of the party winning eight or more seats in Alberta now seem slim.
The Conservatives have picked up a point in the Prairies and lead by 14 points over the Liberals, who have held steady. The NDP is down one point to 11% in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Things have been holding largely steady in Ontario, where the Conservatives have picked up one point. The Liberals are still leading by a margin of roughly 10 points, however, which is what is maintaining them comfortably in majority territory.
There’s been little movement in Quebec over the last week. While we’ve seen some forward movement for the Bloc in the Liaison and Mainstreet polls, as mentioned, EKOS had the party at very low numbers in its polls this week, which is dragging the BQ down in the average. We need more data.
The Liberals have widened their lead by five points in Atlantic Canada, picking up three points in the average over the last week. The Conservatives are down two points. At the national level, this movement has somewhat mitigated the swing in Alberta — the Liberals and Conservatives have spent the week consolidating the regions in the country where they are strongest (and where they have the least new seats to gain), causing little shift in the seat projection or the national portrait. For now.
THE WRIT’S CAMPAIGN BUS
The bus driver is gorging on Easter chocolate and is in no condition to drive. He’ll be back on the road soon.
Where the leaders are: Mark Carney is campaigning east of Toronto, with stops in Whitby, Newcastle and Peterborough, Ontario. Pierre Poilievre is in Richmond in the B.C. Lower Mainland, while Jagmeet Singh is also campaigning in British Columbia. He’ll be in Burnaby, Surrey and Victoria. Yves-François Blanchet is in the Eastern Townships in Magog, Quebec.
TODAY in the #EveryElectionProject
On this day in 2016, Greg Selinger’s New Democrats were finally put out of their misery in the Manitoba provincial election. The NDP had been floundering with internal dissent, leadership challenges and rock-bottom polls ever since it won re-election in 2011. In 2016, Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservatives delivered the final blow, winning 40 seats to the NDP’s 14. The Liberals under Rana Bokhari won three seats. You can read more about this election here.
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Cette semaine au balado Les chiffres, on discute des débats des chefs, ainsi que des récents sondages qui montrent une course légèrement plus compétitive entre les libéraux et les conservateurs. Nous décortiquons les chiffres au Québec, où le Bloc semble remonter la pente.