Updated October 4, 2026 (10:31 PM) - Most, if not all, of the final polls of this campaign have been published and they are unanimous on one thing: the Parti Québécois should win the election. But will it be a majority or minority government?
The PQ is projected to win in 94% of the model’s simulations (the other 6% are scenarios in which the polls completely miss the mark) but only wins 64 or more seats, the threshold for a majority, in 36% of simulations. In 58% of simulations, the PQ wins a minority.
The party is projected to be leading in 65 seats, but that is at the high end of its ceiling. On average, the PQ wins 58 seats. So, the majority/minority is on a knife’s edge, but a minority is the marginally more likely outcome because there aren’t a lot of scenarios in which the PQ clears the 64-seat mark very easily.
The Liberals look set to resume the official opposition role with around 37 seats, while the Conservatives are likely to make a splash and achieve official party status, either because they will win at least 12 seats or because they could hit 20% of the vote (or, quite possibly, both, as the party is projected to win around 17 seats and just over 20% of the vote).
Québec Solidaire is holding on to most of its incumbent seats but is likely to lose a few. When it comes to the Coalition Avenir Québec, it’s a distinct possibility that the party will go from its landslide, 90-seat victory in 2022 to a complete wipeout, an ignominious fate few governing parties have experienced anywhere in Canadian history. But there is enough uncertainty, and enough toss-ups, for the CAQ to have a hope of winning a few seats merely by chance. But it’s hard to identify what seats they could be, if any, because the party is projected to be leading in none.
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 👇