Election Writ 4/22: Liberals still favoured after flurry of new polling
A tightening national race masks a decisive Liberal edge in Ontario and B.C.
Polls from nine separate pollsters were released over the last 24-36 hours, nearly reseting the Poll Tracker aggregate in its entirety. But despite the flurry of polls, the overall portrait of the race has hardly stirred.
The Liberals are still in the lead nationally, if by a smaller margin, but enjoy decisive advantages in the key battlegrounds of Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.
Also in today’s newsletter: A deeper dive into the polls that have been published since the weekend. Plus, where the leaders are today — and why.
The Liberals have 43.1% support in the Poll Tracker, their lowest score since the March 31 update. The Conservatives have ticked up a little to 38.4%, matching their best result so far in the campaign. That puts the gap between the two parties at just 4.7 points.
The New Democrats are stuck at 8.3%, while the Bloc Québécois is up to 25.4% in Quebec.
The gap has certainly narrowed in the aggregate. The Liberals were ahead by 6.2 points a week ago and by 7.1 points the week before that, which was about as wide as the margin got in the Poll Tracker. But that means the Conservatives have only closed the gap by 2.4 points over the last two weeks. At this rate, the Conservatives will take the lead in national polls on May 20.
The only problem is that the election is on April 28.
The Liberals have slipped to 191 seats in the projection, with the Conservatives sitting at 123, the Bloc at 23 and the NDP still at five, with the Greens projected to hold one of their seats. While that is majority territory for the Liberals, their floor in the likely range (which takes into account normal polling and projection errors) drops down to 170 seats, just under the threshold for a majority government. This is the first update in more than three weeks in which the Liberal floor is under 172.
But the Conservative ceiling remains out of range of having a likely chance of eking out a win. The party is topping out at 138 seats. That’s a respectable gain for the party, but it wouldn’t be enough for a minority government. It’s only in the projection’s maximum and minimum ranges, which assumes substantial errors in the polls, that the two parties overlap — and even then it is only at the extremes.
The new polls added to the projection since yesterday represent 62% of the weight of the entire aggregate. The polls added yesterday are worth another 15%. So, the Poll Tracker has effectively been reset with new polls since the weekend. And, despite this reset, things have hardly moved.
Since yesterday’s update, the Conservatives have closed the gap in Ontario by an insignificant 0.2 percentage points. The Liberals still lead by nearly 11 points. The Liberals have widened their lead in British Columbia by 1.2 points to over four points. The Conservatives have made up 2.1 points on the Liberals in Atlantic Canada and the Bloc has shifted the dial by 1.1 points in its favour in Quebec, but the Liberals remain in the lead in those regions by 17 and 15 points, respectively.
That’s the aggregate. But the individual poll results from the nine pollsters who have published in the last day or so don’t leave much doubt in what the aggregate is showing.