After a rather lacklustre Quebec campaign with few moments of high drama — and little real momentum for one party or another — the Parti Québécois under Paul St-Pierre Plamondon is poised to emerge victorious. The question going into tonight’s count is whether or not the PQ can win the 64 seats needed for a majority government.
In the early days of the campaign, it looked like the PQ might have a real fight on its hands as Premier Christine Fréchette used the threats from the Trump administration as a springboard to get her Coalition Avenir Québec back into contention. But the CAQ’s uptick in support didn’t last, and instead the CAQ fell back to the levels of support that forced François Legault to resign earlier this year. But, instead of the PQ taking advantage of the collapse in CAQ support, the Liberals under Charles Milliard and the Conservatives under Éric Duhaime were the main beneficiaries. It didn’t impact the PQ’s lead, but it did narrow its path to a majority.
The final update to The Writ’s Quebec Election Tracker reflects the razor’s edge that this election is ending on. The Parti Québécois is projected as the favourite in 65 ridings across Quebec, one more than is needed for a majority government. The Liberals are favoured in 37 ridings, while the Conservatives are favoured in 17 — a significant increase from the zero seats the party won in 2022. Québec Solidaire, under co-leader Ruba Ghazal, is projected as the favourite in eight seats. The CAQ is favoured in none.
But with the PQ projected to take 29.6% of the vote, and with five parties slated to take at least 10%, there are many races across Quebec that are very tough to predict. For that reason, there is a very wide confidence interval for the number of seats the PQ and the CAQ could win. The average projection, which takes into account the past tendencies of parties to out- or under-perform the polls, as well as the number of closely-contested races, gives the Parti Québécois 58.1 seats. This means that the PQ is pegged as the favourite in a lot of close contests, and that the odds are they are likely to lose more of them than they will win. That pushes them down below the majority threshold.
The Liberals and Conservatives win 36.2 and 16.0 seats, on average, in the model’s 10,000 simulations. This reflects that these parties are expected to finish roughly in line with the polls, and that they are not disproportionately leading or trailing in toss-up contests.
The CAQ, on the other hand, wins an average of 9.8 seats in the model’s simulations. This is a stark difference from the zero seats the party is favoured in, but this shows how the CAQ does not have any obvious seats where it could pull off a win. There are many where the CAQ is projected to be trailing (usually the PQ) by a few percentage points. If the CAQ beats its polls by a little bit, if local candidates and organization make the difference and/or if sheer chance comes into play, the CAQ could come out ahead in several of those seats and stave off a wipeout. Indeed, the most common result in the seat projection’s simulations is a total of three seats for the CAQ.
But which three could they be? Perhaps Trois-Rivières, where Fréchette is on the ballot, or Granby, where the CAQ (and the ADQ before it) has long held the seat. Or perhaps it could be one of the (potentially many) seats where the winner could have less than 30% support, where any party could end up on the top of a three- or four-way race.
However, with the CAQ’s momentum heading in the wrong direction in the final stages of the campaign, there is also a high likelihood that the party will simply not have enough support in any riding to come out on top and instead will have a dozen strong second-place finishes.
The fate of the CAQ will have a big impact on the PQ’s chances of winning a majority government. Every seat the CAQ is able to eke out is one more that could push the PQ below the majority threshold. It’s no coincidence that the PQ is favoured in enough seats to win a majority AND the CAQ is favoured in zero, while the average projection keeps the CAQ alive with a handful of seats and puts the PQ down into minority territory.
The Parti Québécois wins the most seats in 94% of simulations, with the remaining 6% of simulations entailing a big miss in the polls (with the PQ’s significant lead among francophone voters, a polling miss is the only thing that could realistically keep the PQ from winning). But the PQ wins a minority in 58% of simulations, with only 36% ending in a majority. The path to a majority for the PQ is there, but it requires a lot of things to go right — for the party to win nearly all of the toss-up contests, keep the CAQ at low-single digits or zero seats, hold off the Conservatives in central Quebec and in Quebec City and keep the Liberals from making gains in the suburbs around Montreal. No pressure.
Let’s take a look at how the night could go for each of the five major parties, and what their best and worst case scenarios could look like. We’ll start with the PQ.
It’s not quite majority or bust for the PQ, but with St-Pierre Plamondon asking voters for a majority in the final days anything below the 64-seat mark will be a disappointment for the party.
The PQ does have the ability to get there. The model favours the party in 65 seats and has an upper ceiling of 68 seats. That’s not a lot of wiggle room, but there is enough margin for error for the PQ to get a few seats above the majority threshold.
They get there by dominating in the “regions” of Quebec, the swathe of francophone-majority ridings that are located outside of the Montreal and Quebec City metropolitan regions. The PQ is projected to have 33% support in this region, giving them a nearly 10-point lead over the Conservatives. This is their base of around 35 seats, and to that the PQ can add another 20 or so in the suburbs around Montreal, primarily in the Laurentides and Lanaudière regions to the north of the city. The PQ is leading in the suburbs with a projected 33% support, a lead of eight points over the Liberals.
But these two regions put the PQ in a minority position with around 55-60 seats. To get to 64 or more, the PQ needs to win seats in Quebec City and on the island of Montreal. These are different contests than in the regions and suburbs, with the PQ wrestling with the Conservatives in the more outlying parts of Quebec City and with Québec Solidaire in the downtown centres of both. Winning those seats, plus perhaps a few bonus ones in the regions and suburbs, would put them in majority territory.
Failing to breakthrough in the urban centres, losing to the Liberals on the south shore of Montreal and the Eastern Townships and to the Conservatives in the Centre-du-Québec and Mauricie regions would put the PQ short of a majority. It could be an agonizing finish for the PQ — one-third of all simulations end with the PQ between 58 and 63 seats. The party is about as likely to come up just short of a majority as it is to get to the promised land.
The Quebec Liberals have never finished an election in any position other than first or second. First seems out of the cards in this campaign. Second seems virtually assured.
There are a few factors playing against the Liberals. The main one is that the party has just 15% support among francophones, more than 20 points behind the PQ and too low to seriously challenge for government. Accordingly, the Liberal ceiling is 41 seats. But the 54% support the party has among non-francophones ensures a high floor of 29 seats. It is difficult to imagine any other party finishing with between 29 and 41 seats, so that leaves Milliard as the favourite to be the leader of the official opposition (if he can win Orford in the Eastern Townships, which is not a given).
Another factor is the geographic limitation of the Liberals’ support. The party is projected at 42% on the island of Montreal and at 24% in the surrounding suburbs, but is slated to take just 15% of the vote in and around Quebec City and 16% in the regions (primarily the Outaouais and the Eastern Townships). The party is simply not competitive in enough other places of Quebec to be able to put much pressure on the PQ.
But, the Liberals could help block a PQ majority if they pull off some wins in ridings where the PQ is the projected favourite, such as Vachon and La Prairie in the Montérégie and Maurice-Richard in Montreal.
One note about the Liberals’ projected vote share of 23.2%. The five final polls of the campaign had the party between 23% and 25%. The Liberals are on the low-end of that scale because a lot of the party’s support comes in anglophone-majority ridings on the West Island, which have shown lower turnout in the last few elections than other ridings in Quebec. The advance poll turnout suggested that this pattern will hold in this election, meaning the Liberals’ total provincewide vote might prove lower than expected, simply because many of their supporters might stay home in ridings they are guaranteed to win.
Will the CAQ survive the night? That’s one of the big questions that’ll be answered when the results start coming in.
Early in the campaign, the CAQ was the projected winner in 24 ridings, with a ceiling that put them in contention for a minority government (their odds of winning topped out at 30% on Sept. 1). But the three debates and the fading-away of Trump as a top campaign issue took their toll on CAQ support. The party lost roughly half of its support in the Montreal suburbs and the Quebec City region over the course of the campaign, and with that its chances of a respectable finish.
Fréchette, who was at one point tied with St-Pierre Plamondon on the preferred premier question, ended the campaign 13 points behind the PQ leader and in fourth place, ahead of only QS’s Ghazal.
But there is still some potential for the CAQ to win a few seats. The party is projected to have 17% support in the Montreal suburbs and 19% in the regions of Quebec. This means that some ridings in these regions will have the CAQ in the low-to-mid-20s in support. That’s enough to win some three- and four-way races if the non-CAQ vote is perfectly divided. The model thinks the party’s best chances are in Papineau and Chapleau in the Outaouais, Granby in the Eastern Townships and Champlain, Maskinongé and Trois-Rivières in the Mauricie. All six of these seats are ridings where it is not clear who the winner would be if it wasn’t the CAQ, as they aren’t natural fits for the PQ, Liberals or Conservatives, depending on the seat. But that doesn’t mean they fit with the CAQ, either.
The other thing that could boost the CAQ is turnout — not necessarily because of organization or enthusiasm (there might not be much of either at this point), but because of age.
The final polls of the campaign suggest the CAQ has rock-bottom support among younger voters. But it polls more highly among older voters with more than 20% among those over the age of 55.
In the 2018 and 2022 elections, turnout among those over the age of 55 was around 73%. Turnout among those under 35 was around 54%. That has an impact on election results, especially when parties have their supported disproportionately concentrated among one group or the other.
The PQ and Liberals don’t have that issue. They have roughly uniform support among all age groups (though the Liberals might get a small bump from older voters). The Conservatives and Québec Solidaire, however, could be penalized because of their higher support among young voters. By my estimates, the Conservatives might have a penalty of about 0.4 percentage points due to turnout, while QS could under-perform by about 0.7 points.
The CAQ’s turnout bonus might not be as big as it could have been earlier in the campaign, when the party was leading among older voters. But I estimate that the CAQ could get a boost worth nearly one percentage point. That’s not enormous, but based on current riding projections it alone could be enough to swing as many as four seats from the PQ to the CAQ.
That is, if their older voters bother to vote. The final poll from Léger showed that only 4% of Quebecers, including 8% of older Quebecers, think the CAQ will actually win. There’s not a lot of motivation to go out to vote for a lost cause.
The Conservatives are probably going to have a good night regardless of the outcome. The party was shutout of the National Assembly in the last election despite getting nearly 13% of the vote. Now projected to take 20.4% of the vote (the Conservatives get a bonus in part due to the higher-turnout Quebec City region where it has high support), the Conservatives will almost certainly win the 12 seats needed for official party status, and return to the legislature with their first MNA elected under the Conservative banner since the 1930s.
If one party has momentum going into election day, it’s the Conservative Party. In their polls conducted around Sept. 19, the Conservatives had 16% according to Pallas Data and 17% according to Léger. In their final polls, the party was at 20%.
The Conservatives are projected to have 36% support in the Quebec City region, putting them more than eight points ahead of the PQ. The Conservatives are also second in the regions with 23%, up about five points from where they were at the outset of the campaign.
If their vote doesn’t turnout (see above), the party could find itself limited to its core regions in the Quebec City suburbs and in the Beauce. If the party’s momentum carries it forward, however, the party could expand into regions the federal Conservatives haven’t even been able to win — ridings like Champlain and Nicolet—Bécancour.
If we’re searching for reasons the PQ failed to win a majority tonight, the Conservatives might be a key player in that. The party’s increased support in the regions is difficult to model, as it is ‘new’ support that could pop up in unexpected places. Or, it could increase uniformly in much of Quebec, giving the Conservatives lots of strong second-place finishes, but few extra seats.
Ghazal and Québec Solidaire had a somewhat better campaign than expected, with Ghazal performing well in the debates and the party putting forward some proposals that captured the media’s attention for a few days. But QS remains on the defensive.
The party is polling well on the island of Montreal, where it is projected to take 17.5% of the vote. But it could be in tough to defend three of its seats there: Maurice-Richard and Rosemont, where the PQ could flip them, and Verdun, where the Liberals could make a gain. QS is also defending Sherbrooke and its two Quebec City ridings of Jean-Lesage and Taschereau. That’s five QS seats that could go to the PQ. As with the Conservatives, QS could prove to be one of the reasons the PQ fails to win a majority — or, conversely, QS’s inability to hold these seats might be what gives the PQ its majority.
A challenge will be turnout. Québec Solidaire averaged around 21% support among voters under the age of 35, enough to put them tied for third with the Liberals. But they have 4% among voters over the age of 55. The 0.7-point impact I estimated for QS’s turnout means more for a party at 10.1%.
But, it could’ve been worse. This time one year ago, Québec Solidaire risked being reduced to three or four seats. Now, QS has good reason to hope for the balance of power in the National Assembly. That’s not nothing.
Surprises in store
It will be a fascinating night to watch the returns roll in. Even if the polls are very accurate, the seat outcomes could hinge on just a few hundred votes in dozens of ridings. The Parti Québécois is hoping for a majority, and if it gets one the country could be heading toward another referendum on independence before the end of St-Pierre Plamondon’s first term. Even a minority doesn’t rule out a referendum, especially if Québec Solidaire has enough seats to make up the difference.
The fate of the Coalition Avenir Québec, a party started by François Legault as a means to give Quebecers a third way beyond the old sovereignty-federalism debate, could also be decided tonight. If the CAQ drops to zero seats, it could disappear, replaced by the Conservatives as the main party on the right of Quebec’s political spectrum.
And will the Liberals make inroads in francophone Quebec, the parts of the province it has struggled in since the 2018 election? Can Charles Milliard win in Orford and present himself as a plausible alternative premier before Quebecers next head to the polls? And what role will the Conservatives play in Quebec politics going forward, especially if the result is a minority government?
Lots of questions. We’ll have to wait until tonight to have our answers. I’ll be tuning in to watch my (and our) friend Philippe J. Fournier, who will be part of Radio-Canada’s coverage. And I’ll have some analysis tomorrow on the results. Let the voting (and the counting) begin!