Weekly Writ 2/26: Could Carney win a general election?
He'll have to win the leadership first, but hypothetical polling suggests Carney could beat Poilievre.
Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Wednesday morning.
So, the polls have gotten a little wild.
A handful of polls has suggested that the Liberals have closed the gap on the Conservatives and perhaps have even moved ahead — not only because the Conservatives have dropped, but also because the Liberals have surged to higher levels of support than they achieved in either the 2019 or 2021 federal elections.
It’s the kind of abrupt change we rarely see in Canadian politics. Sometimes it happens in the midst of a high-intensity campaign. We don’t normally see it outside of a writ period. Yet, here we are.
If the rise of the Liberals has been meteoric, their numbers are only beginning to match the kind of numbers that have appeared in polls when Mark Carney has been tested as leader of the Liberal Party. Those polls have showed the Carney-led Liberals to be neck-and-neck with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. But do they show the Liberals winning outright?
Let’s dive in.
Using an unweighted, simple average of polls conducted by Pallas Data, the Angus Reid Institute and Léger (two of them) in the month of February, we get the Liberals and Conservatives tied nationally at 39% apiece. The NDP drops to just 10% while the Bloc also falls back in Quebec.
Taking the regional numbers and plugging them into the seat projection model powering the Poll Tracker, we get the following results:
The Liberals win 169 seats, just three short of the threshold for a majority government. Their likely range of seats goes from 150 to 195. Their odds of emerging with more seats than the Conservatives stand at 72% with these numbers. The Conservatives increase their seat holdings to 146, and could win between 124 and 163 seats, but their odds of winning the most seats is just 28%. Carney’s Liberals have a roughly 1-in-2 chance of winning a majority in these projections. Poilievre’s Conservatives’ chances are just 1-in-14.
The New Democrats risk being wiped out in this scenario, with just three projected seats wins and a range of zero to six. This is due to their support being cut to 15% in British Columbia and just 9% in Ontario. With Conservative support still above their 2021 levels and the Liberals up even more, this means the NDP loses seats to the Conservatives and the Liberals, who find themselves virtually tied with the Conservatives in support in both B.C. and Ontario, ahead by 21 points in Atlantic Canada and leading the Bloc Québécois by 11 points in Quebec.
These are astonishing numbers. They are so jaw-dropping that I’ve included a seat-by-seat breakdown in the paywalled section of this newsletter — they are a carnivalesque freak show that just need to be gawked at.
This leads to the natural question of whether or not these hypothetical polling numbers can truly be believed. Have the Liberals so easily freed themselves of all the baggage accumulated over the last nine years in office? Can Mark Carney really live up to the hype?
He was hardly electric in the two Liberal leadership debates held on Monday and Tuesday and if Canadians were expecting more dynamism from him than his numbers could slide. But if they hold, perhaps it’ll be an indication that Canadians have had enough of all the political drama surrounding the Trudeau resignation, the Conservatives’ aggressive campaign tactics and the first month of the Trump presidency. Maybe they want politics to be boring again.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News from the Liberal leadership race and on the resignations of two provincial premiers. Plus, another candidate throws her hat into the ring for the P.E.I. Green leadership.
Polls show the federal race is indeed a race, plus we get some numbers ahead of Yukon’s territorial election this fall. There’s also a full rundown of the seat projections from the Carney scenario above.
Solid majorities for the two premiers who just resigned if the elections were held today.
The Saskatchewan PCs flirt with separatism in the #EveryElectionProject.