NDP gets a bump, but it's too early to know it isn't a blip
Federal Projection Update for June 2, 2026.
The Liberals have taken a tumble in this week’s update to the Vote and Seat Projection, with the New Democrats being the prime beneficiaries. But, while it’s a decent-sized bump for the NDP compared with last week, it’s based on only a small amount of new polling data.
Is it a blip? We’ll have to wait to find out.
The Liberals dropped one point in the vote projection to 45.1%, the lowest they’ve been since the end of February. The party now leads in 220 ridings across the country, a drop of 10 seats since last week, while their average number of seat wins has dropped 5.1 seats to 209.9.
The Conservatives and Bloc have hardly budged in the vote projection, but they’ve both jumped four seats apiece in the number of ridings in which they are projected to be leading with 81 and 24, respectively. Their average number of seat wins in the projection was up 0.9 and 1.5 seats, to 99.5 and 20.3, respectively. This reflects how a few toss-up ridings in which they were trailing last week have flipped over, but since they already had a decent chance of winning them their average number of seat wins hasn’t shifted so dramatically.
Not so for the New Democrats. The party is up 1.5 points nationally to 10.8%, the first time the NDP has hit double-digits since mid-January. The party is leading in 16 ridings, a gain of two since last week, but more importantly wins an average of 12.0 seats in the model. That’s a jump of 2.6 seats from last week and puts them in a position to regain recognized party status — even after taking into account the party’s tendency to under-perform the polls and the number of close contests the NDP is involved in.
For fully interactive charts, tables and maps, head to The Writ’s website:
What’s behind this jump for the New Democrats? A big part of it is the five-point jump in NDP support in this week’s Liaison Strategies poll, from 11% last week to 16% this week. The other polls added to the model in this update (from Pallas and Nanos) have the party in the more-usual 11% to 13% range, but the real test for the NDP will be whether their apparent bump into the low-to-mid-teens is replicated in the next set of polls from Abacus Data and Léger, which have routinely had the New Democrats stuck in single-digits.
I’ll delve more deeply into the polling numbers in the Weekly Writ newsletter on Thursday. Perhaps we’ll already have some more numbers to help us understand what may or may not be happening to the NDP. Stay tuned!
SPECIAL EPISODE OF THE NUMBERS
Buy or Sell: Quebec Election Edition
Quebec’s election is looking like a tough one to predict. But, we’re going to try to anyway.
In this members-only episode, we play a game of Buy or Sell with a focus on the upcoming Quebec provincial election. Based on where the polls and projections put the parties do we think they’re over- or under-valued? Will the Parti Québécois hold its narrow lead? Can the CAQ comeback continue? And will the Quebec Liberals finally breakthrough among francophones?
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