Projection Update: 1-in-4 chance Conservatives fall short of majority

The Liberals close the gap on the Conservatives for the seventh consecutive week.

Only a handful of polls were published over the last week but they continue to show a shrinking margin between the Conservatives and the Liberals to levels that no longer make a Conservative majority victory a sure thing.

I’m on Rosemary Barton Live today so I updated the Poll Tracker a day earlier than usual. The update includes three new polls from Nanos Research, Léger and the Innovative Research Group. The IRG still puts the Conservatives ahead by 13 points, while Léger has the gap at eight points and Nanos at just seven. The Conservatives will win a majority government if their popular vote margin over the Liberals is 13 points. They might not if it is down to seven or eight.

In the Poll Tracker, the Conservatives slipped another 0.3 points this week to 41.8% while the Liberals are up another 0.9 points to 27.4%. They’ve gained a little more than a point per week since Justin Trudeau’s resignation. The New Democrats fall another 0.5 points to just 15.4%.

Since the resignation, the Conservatives have dropped 2.4 points. The NDP has dropped 3.9 points. I had to go back to a previous iteration of the Poll Tracker to find the last time the New Democrats were so low. The answer? It was at the height of Trudeau’s pandemic bump in early 2020. Things are going badly for the Orange Team.

The Conservatives slipped another five seats in the projection to 187. That’s 15 seats above the majority threshold but their floor now dips to 168 — four seats below it. At the maximum and minimum seat ranges, the Conservatives and Liberals actually overlap.

The Liberals are up eight seats to 105, with the Bloc dropping one seat to 34 and the NDP dropping another two seats to just 15. The Bloc’s floor is now 32 seats, or where they were on election night in 2021. The NDP’s floor is only 13 seats. That would be the NDP’s worst performance since the 1990s.

The odds of a Conservative majority if the election were held today have dropped to 75%. There’s another 20% chance the Conservatives would win the most seats but not enough to form a majority government — or any government at all, if they can’t find a dancing partner in the House of Commons.

There’s only a 5% chance the Liberals would win the most seats if the election were held today. That’s obviously low, but they’re off the mat. The last time the Liberals’ chances of winning were as “high” as 5% was in September 2023, the moment the floor started falling out from under the party.

Much of the change in the Liberals’ fortunes has taken place in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada. At the moment of Trudeau’s resignation, the Liberal seat-ceiling in Ontario was 19 seats. It’s now 50. It went from 22 to 32 seats in Quebec and seven to 20 in Atlantic Canada, where the Liberals are now projected to win more seats than the Conservatives. The region that was looking like a Liberal wasteland now has a lot of Liberal leaning and toss-up seats in the projections.

Considering that the model is still giving some weight to older data, looking at the Liberals’ ceiling right now might be the best indicator of where things appear to be headed. And what we’re heading toward is a real race.

You can see all the findings from the Poll Tracker here and seat-by-seat projections here.