Weekly Writ 1/29: Leadership races and polling bumps
Is the Liberal leadership contest giving the party a boost?
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We’re starting to get some clearer indications that the Liberals are indeed experiencing an uptick in the polls.
Is it a big surge or a small bump? That we don’t know just yet. But it is pretty apparent that the Liberals are now in a better position than they were just a few weeks ago.
Polling by EKOS Research has suggested a surge, while polling by Abacus Data has pointed to a bump. The four-week rolling poll from Nanos Research, which even now still incorporates pre-Trudeau resignation data, is giving signals of some improvement for the Liberals. The Angus Reid Institute, testing how the Liberals would do under either Mark Carney or Chrystia Freeland, also shows the party polling better than before Trudeau announced he would be stepping down. So, let’s say that something is happening, but things are still too foggy to know exactly what it is and just how significant it will be.
Could it be Donald Trump or Pierre Poilievre or the Liberal leadership race or atmospheric pressure? What’s behind movement in the polls is hard to tease out in the best of times. It is even harder when a cornucopia of events are taking place concurrently.
But Justin Trudeau’s resignation and the on-going Liberal leadership race would seem to be the most obvious catalyst for this shift in the polls — especially since we’ve seen this sort of thing happen before.
In each of the last four instances where the governing party was in the midst of a leadership race, that party’s polling support has improved. The chart below shows the average of polls conducted in the three months prior to the prime minister of the time announcing his resignation, the average of polls during the leadership race and the difference between the two.
Already polling very high, the Liberals experienced a small three-point bump after Jean Chrétien announced he would be resigning and during the long leadership contest to replace him. The shift was similarly sized during the leadership race to replace Lester Pearson.
The 1984 and 1993 examples — oft-cited these days — are especially relevant because, unlike in 1967-68 and in 2002-03, they took place in the context of the resignation of an unpopular prime minister who had been in office for a long time. During the contest to replace Pierre Trudeau in 1984, the Liberals jumped by seven points. During the race to replace Brian Mulroney in 1993, the Progressive Conservatives doubled their support from a lowly 18% to a competitive 36%.
Of course, the 1984 and 1993 bumps proved short-lived and Paul Martin didn’t match the Liberals’ pre-leadership polling in the 2004 election. Pierre Trudeau in 1968, however, took the Liberals above their polling during the leadership campaign, so it is possible for whatever bump the current iteration of the Liberals are experiencing to be sustained and built upon during the next campaign.
We still need more polling data from a broader range of sources to get a better idea of what is going on. While it seems clear enough that the Liberals are getting a bump, there is still an enormous gap between the Liberals’ best and worst polling that is not easily explained. It might be enough for a vibe-shift within Liberal ranks and an injection of hope that the party desperately needs, but they shouldn’t be planning the next four years of a Carney or Freeland government just yet.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on the comings and goings in the Liberal leadership race and the list of candidates for the next election, plus some leadership news for the Greens, federally and in two provinces.
Polls can’t settle on what the provincial race looks like in Ontario, though they are picking up a Liberal uptick at the federal level. Plus, some numbers out of Quebec that look good for the Bloc and PQ and problematic, in at least one part of the province, for Pierre Poilievre.
A re-elected majority government for Doug Ford and a big PQ victory for Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon if the elections were held today.
A close race in P.E.I. in the #EveryElectionProject.
Upcoming milestones for Pierre Poilievre, Scott Moe and Marit Stiles.