Weekly Writ for Feb. 14: A new polling normal that's not normal at all

Why it's rare to see the Conservatives so high and the Liberals so low, plus the Sask. NDP leads ahead of this year's election

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.

A few recent polls have the Conservatives at or above 40% support while the Liberals wallow at or below 25%. It’s become the new normal in national polling.

But just how normal is it?

One of the reasons the Liberals have been Canada’s “natural governing party” is that it’s been the classic brokerage party in a country with lots of regional, ethnic and linguistic diversity. The backbone of the Liberals’ electoral success has been its long-standing support in Quebec. A century ago, it added those French Canadian votes to the support of farmers in rural Ontario and Western Canada. Over the last half century, those rural votes were replaced by urban ones.

For that reason (among others), it has been relatively common for the Liberals to achieve 40% support or more and for the party’s floor to be quite a bit higher than 25%.

Conversely, the Conservatives have struggled to get to 40% support for long periods of time. Their support among nationalist Quebecers has often been fleeting — here for one or two elections and then gone for a generation. The Conservatives used to be seen as the party of the central Canadian elites, unacceptable to those in the West.

Then it became the party of Western Canadians, unacceptable to the professional class in the cities of central and eastern Canada. The coalition that gave huge landslide victories to the likes of John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney (and, to a much lesser extent, Stephen Harper in 2011) couldn’t be held together for very long as the disparate parts of the big tent pulled the tent apart.

This pattern has been so consistent that the number of times that the Conservatives have found themselves over 40% support while the Liberals were under 25% can be counted on one hand. Since polling began in the 1940s, the only instances when this was the case were:

• Oct. 1984 to Feb. 1985: Brian Mulroney’s post-election honeymoon after his sweeping September 1984 victory against John Turner.

• Apr. to Jun. 2011: Michael Ignatieff’s slide to third place during the 2011 campaign and Stephen Harper’s brief post-election honeymoon.

• Oct. 2023 to present: Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives move ahead as Justin Trudeau’s Liberals fall back.

That’s it — from the Second World War to the mid-1980s, the Liberals never dropped below 25% support in polls. They’ve only done so a few times since.

The Conservatives (and their PC predecessors) only managed to consistently poll over 40% on a few more occasions in addition to the examples above. They also hit 40% or more between 1957 and 1960 (the early Diefenbaker years), a few times during the 1970s (a Joe Clark honeymoon and the 1979 election), much of the early 1980s, around the 1988 free trade election and after the 2008 election during the coalition affair. But these did not coincide with the Liberals dropping below 25%.

In actual elections, the Liberals have only slid below 25% once — in 2011, when they got 19% of the vote and the Conservatives came up just shy of 40%. Since World War II, the Conservatives have only received more than 40% of the vote three times: in 1958, 1984 and 1988. The Liberals got between 28% and 33% of the vote in those elections.

(It’s true that we have a more multi-party system today than we did at in the past. But the NDP (and the CCF before it) has existed since the 1930s. Before the Bloc Québécois, the Créditistes were taking a chunk of the vote off the table in Quebec. For most of its history, Social Credit’s vote share was roughly the same as what the Greens and People’s Party can get in the polls. In the end, the viability of these smaller parties is and has been a reflection of the waxing and waning appeal of the bigger parties. Over the last century, true three-party contests have been the exception. Four-to-six party contests have been the rule.)

There are two ways one could interpret the current state of affairs. The first is that today’s polling landscape is an aberration, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term or replicated at the ballot box. The second is that the present situation is so rare that it puts into context just how extraordinary it is for the Conservatives and how catastrophic it is for the Liberals.

Any Liberals dismissing the polls do so at their peril. The new normal is not normal at all — and that should scare them.

Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:

• News on an upset Green victory in Prince Edward Island and two new candidates entering the race for the Alberta NDP’s leadership.

• For the first time in years, the Saskatchewan NDP leads in a poll, while we also have new numbers on national and Quebec voting intentions. Plus polls on immigration, Israel-Palestine, the use of the Emergencies Act and Canada-U.S. relations.

• Just over 200 seats for the Conservatives if the election were held today.

• A retirement opens up a Saskatoon seat in this week’s riding profile.

• The leadership race that Bill Davis almost lost in the #EveryElectionProject.

• A milestone for Pierre Poilievre.

IN THE NEWS

PEI Greens flip a seat from the PCs over healthcare

Last Wednesday, voters in the Prince Edward Island riding of Borden-Kinkora delivered a rebuke to Dennis King’s Progressive Conservative government, electing a Green MLA in a seat that had previously been PC for nearly a decade.