Projection Update: Trudeau resignation hardly moves the dial

Conservatives lead by 23 points

We usually don’t get a lot of polling numbers in the first weeks of January, but a prime ministerial resignation has a way of getting pollsters busy.

The results from the flurry of post-resignation polls don’t suggest that Justin Trudeau’s announcement has had a ground-shaking impact on voting intentions — at least, not yet.

I update the CBC’s Poll Tracker with the latest polling data every Monday morning. Starting this week and continuing until the writ drops, when I’ll move to daily newsletters (and Poll Tracker updates), I’ll share some quick thoughts on the weekly update with subscribers to The Writ.

Reminder: Paid subscribers get access to the seat-by-seat projections. If you don’t want to miss out on those, upgrade your subscription today!

While the chart below shows that the Liberals are up 1.4 points since the January 6 update, some of that is a product of the polls that were added to the aggregate. Some pollsters, like Abacus Data and Ipsos/Global News, showed no change whatsoever in Liberal support, pegging them still at 20%. Others, like Pallas Data and EKOS Research, showed a bump, with the Liberals at 25% and 26%, respectively. On the whole, however, I think it is safer to say that Trudeau’s resignation has not changed much. Some of the shifts we’ve seen could be polling mirages or be caused by methodological factors (both EKOS and Pallas use IVR technology, while Ipsos and Abacus poll online). At the very least, we can say with some confidence that it hasn’t hurt the Liberals. Whether or not it has helped is less clear.

The Conservatives lead by 23 points and have seen their numbers tick up a little bit since last week. The 1.2-point drop for the NDP might be something real as a slide in NDP fortunes is something we’ve seen across multiple pollsters. All the polls conducted since Trudeau’s resignation have the NDP between 16% and 18%. There was greater variation in polls conducted between Chrystia Freeland’s and Justin Trudeau’s resignations, but those polls included some results between 19% and 21%. The NDP’s numbers over the next little while will be worth watching.

For the seat projection, the Conservatives’ likely range is between 208 and 239 seats, virtually unchanged from last week’s update when it was 206 to 244 seats. The Liberals are in a slightly better position than they were a week ago and are projected to win between 34 and 63 seats, up about four or five seats from last week.

Their precise projected result is 49 seats, which puts them above the Bloc Québécois’s projected range of 40 to 43 seats. But the gap isn’t big, and the Liberals’ floor is far lower than the Bloc’s. The NDP’s upper range of 38 seats looks ambitious in the present circumstances. They are projected to win 25 seats right now, which makes a second-place finish in seats unlikely. Third is possible if the Liberals collapse — and those two things are linked, as the NDP would benefit from a further Liberal collapse in some urban parts of the country.

Regionally, there are two sets of numbers worth noting this week. In Quebec, the Liberals have now fallen to 21% and are well below the Conservatives’ 26%, let alone the Bloc’s 36%. Some of the polls published in the last week were helpful to the Liberals in British Columbia and Ontario, but the trend line for the Liberals in Quebec continues to point down.

The other region that stands out is Atlantic Canada, where the Liberals’ support is higher than anywhere else in the country. Abacus, for instance, had the Liberals at 36% in Atlantic Canada, just eight points behind the Conservatives. Even the catastrophic Angus Reid Institute poll conducted at the end of December that had the Liberals at 16% nationally still had the party at 30% in Atlantic Canada. The Liberals seem to have a higher floor in the region, and accordingly they are still currently projected to hold five to seven seats on the east coast.

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