Welcome to the Election Writ, a special-edition newsletter to get you up-to-date on the ongoing campaign in Quebec.
It’s been a relatively placid week on the Quebec election campaign trail, though not through want of trying to mix things up.
With five parties in the running to win seats, all with pockets of strong support in different parts of the province, there’s been a cacophony of platform policies, candidate controversies and attacks against one leader or another. The end result, though, is that nothing has really broken though to capture voters’ attentions.
Perhaps accordingly, the latest Pallas Data poll (the only survey published since September 1) shows very little change in voting intentions. But the changes that did occur, primarily at the regional level, have improved the Parti Québécois’s chances.
Today’s projection update has the PQ leading in 58 seats, a gain of 10 from the last projection update. The party wins 49 seats on average in the model’s 10,000 simulations, another indication of the high number of close contests involving the PQ (the odds are they can’t win all of them). These gains have come at the expense of the CAQ and the Liberals, each down about three seats in the average projection.
The Liberals have fallen below 20% in the vote projection because of how the party’s support is distributed regionally (the vote projection model is not just an average of the polls, but takes into account regional results and turnout) and are leading in 33 seats. On average, they win 30.1 seats — a touch lower than the CAQ’s average haul of 31 seats. If the CAQ beats its polls (and its support among older voters suggests that is likely) and wins enough of the toss-ups, the CAQ could finish second in the seat count and push the Liberals down to third place. The Liberals have never finished worse than second in Quebec.
The PQ’s improved position is due to stronger numbers from Pallas in the regions of Quebec — all those predominantly francophone ridings outside of the Montreal and Quebec City areas. In fact, the projection shows the PQ slipping on the island of Montreal and in Quebec City. But 1) there are not as many seats in those regions and 2) the PQ is not in contention in very many of them, so the PQ can easily afford to lose a step in the two biggest cities if it means doing better where their target seats are located.
Also in today’s newsletter: A deeper look at the Pallas poll and a trip to the Bas-Saint-Laurent.
But if the election is settling in as voters try to locate themselves in the midst of a rather confusing campaign, that doesn’t mean it still isn’t on a razor’s edge.