Election Writ 4/26: Awaiting the final numbers
What we've seen so far doesn't suggest a late shift in support.
Hurry up and wait — for the final polls of this campaign.
As of writing, we now have a last set of numbers from Léger and Pollara Strategic Insights. While Pollara shows a tightening from the eight-point lead it had last week to a three-point Liberal lead in its final poll (41% to 38%), the underlying numbers remain good for the Liberals. After some hint of a Bloc Québécois surge, for instance, Pollara put the Liberals back in front by 13 points. The Liberals’ margin in Ontario was nine and the party was still up by four points in B.C.
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Léger does not show any tightening from its previous survey, with the Liberals still leading by four points (43% to 39%). The party was ahead by three points in British Columbia and by eight points in Ontario. A separate large-sample survey of Quebec put the Liberals ahead of the Bloc by 16 points (42% to 26%), a margin which points to substantial gains for the Liberals in the province. These are hard numbers to ignore when they come from a pollster with one of the best track records in recent elections.
In addition to these two surveys, we had new numbers from the Mainstreet Research and Nanos Research tracking polls. Mainstreet put the Liberals back in front by five points (45% to 40%) while Nanos had the gap narrowing to three points (42% to 39%). There isn’t a consistent trend across the two polls.
This would suggest that, at least up until Thursday or Friday when all of these polls were out of the field, we aren’t seeing a late swing that should upend our priors heading into the weekend. The Liberals are leading by roughly four points (it’s 3.8 in the Poll Tracker) nationally and are retaining solid leads in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada, while narrowly staying ahead in British Columbia.
We’ll wait to see what the final day of polls produces. I’m expecting that some pollsters will stay in the field as late as possible on Sunday, in addition to today, so we should see lots more numbers between now and midnight tomorrow.
As to what you can expect from me, I’ll be updating the Poll Tracker a few times tomorrow so keep an eye on my social media channels to see when new updates are published. The seat-by-seat projections here will also be updated throughout the day. I should have my final update posted late tomorrow night. My day is otherwise quite booked (among other things, I have a rehearsal in preparation for the election night special on CPAC that I’ll be participating in, and which I hope you’ll watch!) so I might not have time to write a final Election Writ tomorrow. But I will be back on Monday morning with a final analysis of where things stand ahead of the polls closing.
In the meantime, let’s take a look at where things stand in the Poll Tracker today and compare that to where things stood in the Poll Tracker on the Saturday before the 2021 election. It explains a lot of why the Liberals remain the heavy favourites.