Updated September 1, 2026
The early polls of the campaign suggest that the Parti Québécois has dropped into minority territory as the Coalition Avenir Québec closes the gap, primarily at the expense of the Liberals.
The projection now shows the PQ leading in 48 seats and winning an average of 44 in the model’s 10,000 simulations. They are still the favourites to win the election at this early stage, but it is unlikely that any party could cobble together a majority government with these numbers. The PQ and CAQ are battling it out in dozens of ridings across the province and the outcome of the election hinges on those PQ-CAQ contests.
While the Liberals are losing steam, they nevertheless are in a position to win enough seats to form the official opposition. The Conservatives and Québec Solidaire are both holding relatively steady and would win some 15 to 20 seats between them.
Note to Readers: These projections are presented using Datawrapper’s interactive charts. They are best viewed on a desktop. In most cases, you can click, tap or hover over the charts to interact with them.
Full regional breakdowns and tracking charts are available for subscribers below, as are complete riding-level projections. A full methodological explanation of how the vote and seat projection model works can be found here.
The Vote Projection is based primarily on a weighted average of all publicly-available provincial and regional polls. The weighted average is then used to project the outcome in all 127 ridings across Quebec, taking into account local candidates. Those individual riding-level projections are then weighted by the number of eligible voters in each riding and past turnout to determine the provincial vote projection for each party.
The Seat Leading shows the number of seats in which each party is projected to be ahead. Parties are assigned a range of likely vote share in each riding based on past polling and modelling errors and 10,000 simulations are run to assign to each party a number of ridings in which they are in contention. The High and Low ranges take into account 95% of all likely outcomes, while the Avg. Projection shows the average number of seats each party wins in these simulations, which takes into account the tendency for parties to under- or out-perform their polls, as well as the number of toss-up contests across the province.
Wondering how to interpret the Seats Leading and the Avg. Projection? While the Seat Projection is The Writ’s “official call”, the Avg. Projection is an important guide to understanding the projections, in conjunction with the high and low ranges. Seat projections are rarely right on target, so the Avg. Projection should set expectations. In other words, if a party is leading in 25 seats but the Avg. Projection is 21.2, your expectation should be that the party will win around 25 seats, with a greater likelihood that the party under-performs that target rather than beats it.
The percentage of simulations in which each party wins a majority or a plurality of seats is shown below.
A full breakdown of the methodology behind the vote and seat projection model can be found here:
The table below includes all recent provincial voting intentions polls that are publicly available. You can click or tap on the name of the polling firm in the left-most column to go directly to that polling firm’s original poll release.
Vote and seat projections broken down by region, tracking charts, maps and detailed projections for all 127 ridings across Quebec, as well as vote projections for smaller regions within the province, are available for subscribers of The Writ below 👇