The State of the Writ, Year 4
How things are going with The Writ after four years.
Four years is usually not a big milestone anniversary. But, in politics, four years is an entire electoral cycle. And The Writ has now endured for four years — one full trip around the electoral calendar. That’s a big milestone for me!
It means this newsletter/website has now covered two federal elections and 11 provincial elections, as well as dozens of byelections and party leadership races. It also means that The Writ is now set to embark on another trip around the electoral sun. Thanks to you!
Yes, it is now time for the annual stock-taking here at The Writ, in which I reflect on how this project is going and share my thoughts, and a few numbers, with readers. I do this exercise publicly because The Writ, and newsletters like it, are a very different beast than most media. While the traditional news outlet tries to broadcast its content to the widest audience possible, hoping to attract the eyes and ears of whoever it can, this newsletter is aimed at a very specific audience: one that has actively sought it out.
It’s a more personal relationship — even if that relationship is with an audience that is now big enough to fill a hockey arena. But, for that reason, I continue to think it’s worthwhile to bring you into the inner circle of this project, because it only exists with your continued support.
The last year has easily been the biggest one for The Writ since it was launched in June 2021. That proved to be only a few weeks before the writ was dropped on the 2021 campaign and The Writ was still finding its footing and its audience. This time, I was better prepared. I had daily newsletters, videos and podcasts and seat projections here on The Writ. The long hours paid off with a tremendous increase in subscriptions, views and listens.
But that was just the culmination of what had already proved to be a big year. Federal politics was rocked by the Liberals’ byelection defeats in Toronto–St. Paul’s and LaSalle–Émard–Verdun. The turmoil it sparked within the Liberal caucus led to the resignation of Justin Trudeau and the installation of Mark Carney as his replacement after a brief leadership contest.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan and British Columbia all went to the polls over an overlapping span of a few months in the fall of 2024 and Doug Ford dropped the writ on an early election in February 2025. It was a thrilling, surprising and busy year. It was a blast to cover it all!
But now that a new electoral cycle is beginning and, as you’ll see below, the audience to The Writ is now predominantly new, it’s a good time to reset, reboot and re-think a few things.
The backbone of The Writ remains the Weekly Writ, which since the campaign concluded has moved to Thursdays instead of Wednesdays. This change works better for my own production schedule and makes it a little easier to fit in other content earlier in the week. The Numbers is being published on Tuesday afternoons and you can expect other pieces to be published in the days in between from time to time.
But, after putting out multiple pieces of content every day during the campaign, and considering the politics fatigue that has followed the election, I’m cognizant of not producing more than readers can reasonably consume. The Weekly Writ also has a good mix of timely and less-timely segments that can be digested over a few days — you don’t need to cram it all in on Thursday mornings!
New projection model
One of the bigger changes I’m working toward here on The Writ is the publication of some vote and seat projections. When I launched The Writ in 2021, I wanted to move away from publishing projection models. But, two Poll Trackers later, I’ve come to realize that it is something I enjoy doing too much. I published some vote and seat projections during the Ontario election campaign and they were quite popular, so I am aiming to maintain a running federal projection model and launch some provincial models in the run-up to those elections.
But the 2025 election campaign led me to conclude that it was time to re-vamp the model. With only a few adjustments, I’ve used the same basic model for the last decade. I’m in the process of starting from scratch and rebuilding the model piece-by-piece, re-assessing some of the basic building blocks of the model that I haven’t touched in years.
It’ll be a bit of a process and I think you might find it interesting to be taken along for the ride. So, periodically I’ll publish some model updates on the development of the new model and share some of the findings that come out of this re-build.
Once the new model is prepared, it should have a home here on The Writ and my analyses of the projections will replace the Grenier Political Report and the If The Election Were Held Today portions of the Weekly Writ that existed prior to the federal campaign. As development of the model proceeds, I’ll look into ways to have the projections hosted here on the website with some degree of interactivity.
With the provincial and federal elections taking up a lot of my time, only another 20 or so entries of the #EveryElectionProject were added to the tally over the last 12 months. Nevertheless, the total now stands at 138 historical capsules covering past federal, provincial and territorial elections and party leadership races. My Sisyphean task of trying to write a short history of every electoral contest in Canadian history will continue into Year 5!
Podcasting and broadcasting
It’s been a great joy to record The Numbers (and Les chiffres) with Philippe J. Fournier. Working on a newsletter like this can be a lonely task, so it’s a lot of fun to have a partner like Philippe for The Numbers. The podcast has grown a lot, particularly over the course of the election campaign, and it has supplanted The Writ Podcast as my weekly podcast offering.
I will publish more episodes of The Writ Podcast, but they will be more targeted around special events and elections, like the return of Parliament in the fall, the upcoming Newfoundland and Labrador provincial election and any major party leadership races. I think the guest/interview/panel format is good for giving you a deep dive into an upcoming event, but my workload does not allow for producing multiple podcasts every week so I prefer to reserve these episodes for special occasions.
Still, The Writ Podcast grew during the election campaign. A year ago, the podcast garnered a combined 4,000 views and downloads per episode, but during the campaign that grew to between 12,000 and 22,000. I really enjoyed both of the panels I had during the campaign, and I’ll try to convene them again in the future.
The YouTube Channel saw phenomenal growth over the last year. It had around 2,800 subscribers a year ago. It’s now over 11,000, with videos routinely getting between 20,000 and 30,000 views during the campaign — our last episode of The Numbers for the campaign had nearly 40,000. A year ago, videos usually had around 3,000 views.
As expected, those numbers have come down since the election has passed and interest has diminished. But the floor today is far higher than the ceiling was a year ago (our episode last week surpassed 10,000 views), so I take that as a real positive.
Livestreams of election results were quite successful, with our stream of the Toronto–St. Paul’s byelection last June topping out at an astonishing 136,000 views. We also get around 50,000 views for the streams of the B.C. election and the LaSalle–Émard–Verdun and Elmwood–Transcona byelections last fall.
During the campaign, I also produced a few solo episodes of The Writ Show, something I might bring back in the future during election campaigns. They performed well during the election, but I think they would have limited appeal outside of a writ period.
And, of course, a federal election meant lots of TV and radio for me. Thanks to everyone who tuned-in to catch me on CBC or CPAC, especially for CPAC’s election night special! It was a career highlight to “the guy at the map” for a federal election.
Audience growth
Alright, time to get into the nitty-gritty of The Writ.
The number of total subscribers grew rapidly over the course of the last few months. The Writ is now ranked 34th on Substack’s World Politics bestsellers list. By my reckoning, it is the 4th or 5th Canadian Substack on that list.
Two years ago at this time, The Writ had about 5,200 free and paid subscribers. One year ago, it had about 7,300. Today, it is around 17,900!
Things really accelerated with Justin Trudeau’s resignation and the kick-off of the 2025 election campaign. The Poll Tracker that I ran for the CBC, which featured a prominent link to The Writ, was a big help. But events, dear boy, events, helped a lot, too. The Writ had about 9,300 subscribers when Trudeau announced his resignation. That number doubled by the end of the election campaign.
The peak was on election day itself, when there were just over 18,800 total subscribers (or nearly 21,000 when including Substack “followers”. I don’t quite understand what’s the difference). Since then, there has been a slow bleed of subscribers as people disconnect from politics. The same thing happened after the 2021 election. My goal for the coming year, then, is to keep as many of you interested and subscribed as possible!
I’ll get into the number of paid subscribers to The Writ after the paywall. But if you aren’t already a paid subscriber, I hope you’ll consider supporting this project.
There might not be a major election on the calendar in the next 12 months, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a lot of interesting things happening. We have leadership questions surrounding Pierre Poilievre, a contest that has to get started to replace Jagmeet Singh and the first months of Mark Carney’s first term to gauge.
Elections are scheduled in Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon and Nunavut, and there are some major municipal elections on the docket this fall as well. We’ll have byelections and provincial party leadership contests and the run-up to the election in Quebec. We could also have an Alberta referendum on independence and early elections — if anyone wants to follow Doug Ford’s lead and call an election a year early, that puts Alberta, Manitoba and PEI on the radar in 2026!
So, I hope you’ll take the plunge and support me and the work I’m doing at The Writ. If you can’t swing it just yet, no worries — I still appreciate your readership and interest! Share it with a friend!
Now to business.