Projection Update: Liberals are now the favourite
Boy, that escalated quickly.
Since The Writ will be moving to daily newsletters once the writ drops (presumably this weekend), we might as well get into the swing of things. And, with the shift that just took place in the Poll Tracker, I couldn’t let today’s update go without comment.
Monday was a dramatic day in the polling world, as polls from Léger and the Angus Reid Institute, two firms with very respectable records in federal elections, put the Liberals in the lead nationwide. And not only were the Liberals leading, but they were enjoying 42% support in both polls.
That’s majority territory.
The Conservatives trailed in the two polls with 39% and 37%, respectively, giving the Liberals modest leads of three and five points. But that’s enough for a Liberal majority, particularly when the Liberals are over 40% support.
The Poll Tracker continues to lag a little but it’s catching up (and it’s worth pointing out that three other polls added since yesterday’s update range from a three-point Liberal lead to a Conservative one-point lead). In the aggregate, the Conservative margin is down to just 2.2 points.
The New Democrats keep sliding and are now down to 12.4%. The Léger and ARI polls had the NDP at just 9%, so things could keep getting worse for them. The space they are leaving vacant is being taken up by the Liberals, who are now projected to win more seats than the Conservatives.
The Liberals have moved ahead in the seat projection for the first time since June 2023. The party is projected to win 163 seats, just nine short of a majority, while the Conservatives have fallen to 147 seats.
There is a fair bit of overlap between the two parties, but only the Liberals cross the majority threshold in their likely ranges. For that reason, and because a lot of the overlap is in minority territory, the Liberals are actually projected to have a slightly higher chance of winning a majority government with these numbers than they do a minority government.
The NDP has fallen to only six seats in the projection, with a range running from four to 14 seats. Considering the resilience that the Ontario NDP’s incumbents demonstrated in last month’s provincial election, the party could end up on the higher end of that range. But the prospects for the NDP are grim when they have dropped below 13% nationwide and east of Manitoba.
Who could be the NDP’s survivors?
So, who could be the federal NDP incumbents that could survive the cull? Let’s look at the list.