Liberals level out — have they hit a ceiling?
Federal Projection Update for March 31, 2026
This week’s update to The Writ’s federal projection suggests the Liberals might have reached their plateau.
The Liberals sit at 45.8% in the vote projection, down only 0.2 points from last week. The party has been sitting around 46% since the beginning of March, a new cruising altitude for the Liberals since rising from around 40% in January. The party is projected to be leading in 215 seats (and averaging 209.2 seat wins when taking into account potential polling and modelling errors), again largely unchanged since the beginning of the month.
While the Liberals have levelled out, it’s not clear that the Conservatives have. They’re down just 0.3 points from last week to 34.1% in the projection, but unlike the Liberals they have been on a steady (if slow) downward trend. With the exception of a few marginal upticks, they’ve been dropping almost every week since January when they were at 38%. This has pushed them down to 93 in the number of seats they are leading in and an average of 105 seat wins.
For fully interactive charts, tables and maps, head to The Writ’s website:
We’ll have to keep an eye on those Conservative numbers. Some polls have suggested that the party might be rebounding, but for every (relatively) good poll we’ve seen for the Conservatives lately there have been some bad ones.
The New Democrats are sitting at 9.2% in the vote projection and 11 seats, but just 8.2 seats on average when taking into account their tendency to under-perform the polls. These numbers are drawn from polling conducted before Avi Lewis’s leadership victory on Sunday but, as we can see from the regional breakdown, the NDP has a lot of work to do.