Projection Update: Polls settle into newly competitive race

The Conservatives lead, but not by enough to ensure a majority.

My apologies that there was no Weekly Writ in your inbox this morning. There was a death in the family and I’ve been travelling to attend the funeral. Things should now return to a normal schedule, with a new episode of The Numbers later this week and a return of the Weekly Writ next Wednesday — barring a writ drop, of course, in which case The Writ will transition to daily newsletters!

---

Could we be settling into a new normal?

Last week, a series of polls suggested that the gap between the Conservatives and Liberals had been entirely erased. New polls published over the last few days, however, show the Conservatives with a comfortable lead in the high single-digits. Could the Liberal surge be abating?

Most of the polls newly added to the Poll Tracker are not from the polling firms that showed the tied national race. Two polls from the Innovative Research Group (here and here) put the gap at seven and nine points, suggesting a tightening trend line compared to the 13-point leads recorded earlier in February, but the IRG never had the Liberals and Conservatives neck-and-neck. Pollara, which puts the Conservative lead at 10 points, hasn’t published a new federal poll in some time so we don’t have an indication of a recent trend. Nanos Research has only a three-point gap and is also suggesting a shrinking margin, but Nanos is a lagging indicator as it is a four-week rolling poll.

But Léger was one of the polls to show a nearly-tied race in its release last week, when the margin was only three points. Its latest sounding has the gap back to 13 points as the Conservatives gained five and the Liberals lost five. This suggests a pullback from the Liberal surge that was picked up in other polls (such as Ipsos) but we’ll need corroboration of the reversion to the mean from some of those other pollsters that showed a close race to know if the surge is over.

The previous Poll Tracker update (which I didn’t write a post about on The Writ, as we were in the final days of the Ontario election) was already showing a nine-point lead for the Conservatives so the addition of five polls with an average margin of a little more than eight points has not changed the dial. The Conservatives are holding at 40.3%, with the Liberals at 30.8% and the NDP at a new low of 14.4%.

The projection only uses polls that either mention Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader or mention no leader names. The gap would be much smaller if polls mentioning Mark Carney were included instead. But this provides a baseline from which to measure the impact of Carney’s leadership of the Liberals, assuming he wins on Sunday.

A milestone was reached in my mid-week projection update last week, as the Conservatives dipped just below the majority threshold in the seat projection for the first time in nearly two years. They now stand at 171 seats, down 16 from where they were the last time I published a Projection Update on The Writ. Accordingly, the Conservatives’ chances of securing a majority have gone from 75% to just 51%.

The Liberals are up 20 seats from my last update here to 125 in the projection and their ceiling of 152 is just above the Conservative floor of 150. For that reason, the Liberals’ chances of an outright victory have gone from about 5% to roughly 18%.

The Bloc Québécois has slid from 34 to 31 seats in the projection, so they could potentially lose a seat. The NDP is down one to just 14 seats as the party continues to struggle. (The experience of the Ontario NDP suggests that incumbent NDP MPs might be harder to defeat than expected, but even the Marit Stiles’s Ontario NDP isn’t polling as badly as Jagmeet Singh’s NDP.)

The regional shifts in support have been significant, with the Liberals now ahead of the NDP for second place throughout Western Canada. The party is also leading in Atlantic Canada by six points and is ahead of the Bloc in Quebec by nearly three. Those are big swings, as the Conservatives led in Atlantic Canada by 17 points at the beginning of January and the Bloc was ahead by 14.

The seat projections in Ontario and Quebec tell two different stories. One is that the Liberals are now back in the game because of their gains in Ontario and Quebec, where they could win the most seats. But the other story is that the Conservatives’ continuing lead in Ontario is delivering a lot of seats and keeping them afloat.

The Conservative lead in Ontario has persisted despite the swings elsewhere. They are still ahead by nine points, though they led by 25 at the beginning of January. That net swing of 16 points is less than we’ve seen in Atlantic Canada (23 points), but is about on par with what has happened in British Columbia, which indicates that the Ontario numbers might not be overly influenced by the provincial campaign that has just come to a close.

In both Ontario and B.C., the Conservatives are still leading by enough to win them a lot of seats. But, especially in Ontario, the gap is approaching a place where every point gained starts to flip a lot of seats back to the Liberals.

We’ll see where this goes over the next few days. The Léger poll’s whiplash was rather severe for the Liberals so look out to see if other polls corroborate it. Regardless, we’re now in territory where the Conservatives can no longer count on a majority victory. That’s the kind of competitive race that seemed unthinkable two months ago.

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