Welcome to the Election Writ, a special-edition newsletter to get you up-to-date on the ongoing campaign in Quebec.
The Quebec election campaign continues to sleepily head toward the October 5 voting day with no party catching fire or in free-fall. This week’s two debates — organized by TVA on Tuesday and Noovo on Wednesday — could shake things up. But, so far, voting intentions have been largely immovable.
The Writ’s Quebec Election Tracker was updated this morning with new polling numbers from Léger, Synopsis Recherche and Pallas Data. I’ll delve into these polls in further detail below, but first let’s get to the projection update.
There’s been little change since last week, with the Parti Québécois leading with 28.7% in the vote projection, down 0.7 points from the previous update. The Coalition Avenir Québec has slipped 0.6 points to 22.1%, while the Liberals have increased by 1.4 points to 21.5%. Both the Conservatives and Québec Solidaire are unchanged at 16.1% and 10.3%, respectively.
The seat projection has also shifted only slightly. The PQ leads in 57 seats, down two, and wins an average of 47.4 seats in the model’s 10,000 simulations, a drop of 1.7 seats. The CAQ leads in 19 seats, an increase of two, but its average seat haul has dropped 1.4 seats to 29.2. Both of the parties vying for government have seen their numbers move further away from the majority threshold.
The average projection for the Liberals, Conservatives, and Québec Solidaire is very similar to the numbers of seats in which these parties are leading. The Liberals are ahead in 34 seats, and so have the inside track on official opposition status, while the Conservatives and QS lead in nine and eight seats, respectively. QS has jumped one seat since last week in both the number of seats in which they’re leading and their average number of seat wins.
But, in the end, there isn’t much that has changed since the initial spike in support for the CAQ at the beginning of the campaign. That momentum has halted, and maybe even reversed. The Liberals’ decline has ceased, and also maybe has been reversed. The PQ, meanwhile, remains stuck below 30% support and needing a lot of luck to even think about winning a majority government with these kinds of numbers. We’re in the same wait-and-see position that we’ve been in for a few weeks now, as we wait to see if anything is going to transform what remains an unmoving and disinterested public opinion environment.
Also in today’s newsletter: Breaking down the three new polls, plus we take a trip to Montreal’s south shore.
If there is some potential for movement out of the debates, it looks like it could be between the CAQ and the Liberals. It’s been between these two parties that we’ve seen some shifts in support since the beginning of the campaign, and both Christine Fréchette of the CAQ and Charles Milliard of the Liberals will be participating in their first leaders debates. Fréchette is a better known quantity thanks to her brief time as premier, but she hasn’t been seen in this setting before. For Milliard, this will be his grand debut for many voters.
There might be less at stake for the other three leaders. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon of the PQ would certainly like to grow his support, but his referendum promise gives him a hard ceiling — as well as a hard floor. If he can’t lure some voters over from other parties (polls suggest his greatest potential is among CAQ and QS voters based on second choice support, though he’s unlikely to hit on a message that can appeal to both groups) the best he can hope for is that neither Fréchette nor Milliard does enough to break out from the pack. Ruba Ghazal merely has to maintain her support, which on current polling would re-elect nearly all of her incumbents. Holding what he’s got is also the goal for Éric Duhaime — he’d happily take his Conservatives’ current polling numbers and seat projections on October 5.
But with so little movement in this listless campaign, it seems like a lot to expect two debates (and a third next week) to break the logjam in the polls. Speaking of which, let’s take a look at those new numbers.