Projection Update: Liberal uptick, not surge, confirmed
The Conservative lead is comfortable but shrinking.
Last week, I said that I was waiting for corroboration or refutation of the trends being picked up by EKOS Research.
With new numbers out over the last week from Léger, Abacus Data and Nanos Research, it seems like the direction of the trend has been corroborated while the size of the Liberals’ surge has been refuted.
At least, for now. But the balance of evidence points to an increase in Liberal support of only a few points, closing the gap with the Conservatives to between 15 and 20 points. No one yet is showing anything close to statistical tie EKOS picked up in its polls — including its parallel IVR and online surveys.
Léger finds that the Liberals are up four points since the beginning of January and five points since before the Christmas break. Abacus shows a two point increase over the last few weeks while Nanos has the Liberals up four points compared to its pre-holidays polling. That’s a clear trend, but it doesn’t match the 14-point gain that EKOS has observed since its December poll.
The latest Poll Tracker update is still wary of moving too abruptly. But it now shows the gap between the Conservatives and Liberals to be 20 points, a margin we haven’t seen since the beginning of December.
The Conservatives dropped one point since last week and now stand at 43.4%, while the Liberals are up one point to 23.4%. The NDP dropped slightly to 17.3%. Their tiny 0.2-point drop isn’t significant, but it has lowered them to their lowest level in the Poll Tracker since before the 2021 election.
The Conservatives stand to win around 210 seats based on these numbers, with a range that goes as low as 187 to as high as 230 seats. The Liberals are projected to win around 70 seats as their range of likely outcomes improves to where it was around the end of November. With a floor of 46 seats, the Liberals are hovering just above the Bloc’s ceiling of 44 seats.
Things continue to turn sour for the NDP as they drop to 20 seats in the projection. Their likely range puts them solidly in fourth place — the Bloc or the Liberals would need to fall below their projected floor to give the NDP a chance of moving up the rankings in the House of Commons.
Two regions are behind some of these shifts. The Liberals have gained six points in Ontario in the Poll Tracker since January 6 when Justin Trudeau resigned. Over that time, the Conservatives have dropped two points and the NDP has dropped three points. Relatively speaking, that loss of three points for the New Democrats hurts them far more than the two-point loss hurts the Conservatives.
The Liberals have also gained five points in Atlantic Canada, closing the gap with the Conservatives to nine points. Here, the pain has been more evenly distributed with both the Conservatives and the NDP down three points since January 6.
Elsewhere, the Liberals are up four points in British Columbia (where the NDP is down three) and three in Alberta. No party’s shifts anywhere else have been greater than two points. The polling trends have been very steady in Quebec, where the Liberals are up only one point. The Conservatives are also up (by two points), making Quebec the only place in the country in which the Conservative position has improved since Trudeau’s resignation.
You can see all the findings from the Poll Tracker here and seat-by-seat projections here.