Weekly Writ for May 8: Is Trudeau a drag on Crombie? Maybe not
Why blaming the OLP's Milton loss on Trudeau isn't backed up by the numbers. Plus, lots of fundraising figures to dive into.
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.
The Ontario Liberals had hopes they could win last week’s provincial byelection in Milton, a riding in the Greater Toronto Area the party should be targeting when Ontarians next go to the polls. They had come close to winning it in 2022 and now with Bonnie Crombie, a former GTA mayor, as leader, the Liberals’ chances of flipping the seat from the PCs should have been good.
Instead, the Liberals lost a little support, the PCs gained even more and the outcome was a more comfortable PC victory than they had last time.
I’ll break down the results of the two byelections in more detail below, but first I wanted to delve into one theory about why the Ontario Liberals failed in Milton: it’s Justin Trudeau’s fault.
But is it?
Robert Benzie of the Toronto Star wrote last week that “one Liberal strategist, speaking confidentially in order to discuss internal deliberations, admitted their candidate was hindered by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unpopular federal party.”
It’s certainly possible. But the numbers don’t really back up the OLP strategist’s claim.
We can come at the question of whether Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are sapping the strength of Bonnie Crombie’s Liberals in a couple ways. Let’s start with the simplest.
Abacus Data has been the only major pollster regularly in the field in Ontario at both the provincial and federal levels. Since the beginning of the year, the Ontario Liberals have averaged 26.5% support in Abacus’s provincial surveys.
In its federal surveys, however, the Trudeau Liberals have averaged 28% support in Ontario.
On the face of it, then, the federal Liberals are more popular in Ontario than are the Crombie Liberals. This doesn’t suggest that Trudeau is dragging the Ontario Liberal Party down with him.
I asked David Coletto for some more data from his polling, in particular the overlap between provincial and federal Liberal supporters. The results suggest that the problem might be in the OLP camp.
Among federal Liberal supporters, only 66% say they would vote for the Ontario Liberals. Another 18% would back the Ontario PCs — those infamous Trudeau-Ford voters.
Among Ontario Liberal supporters, however, 73% say they would vote for the federal Liberals, with only 12% backing the federal Conservatives. Crombie-Poilievre voters, I guess?
In short, the OLP is under-performing the federal Liberals in Ontario because they aren’t getting enough support from the Ontarians who are still backing the Trudeau Liberals.
We don’t see any big difference in the overlap of voters supporting other parties. Both the federal and Ontario Liberals lose about the same share of their voters to the New Democrats and Greens, and there is nearly identical levels of retention between the PCs and Conservatives and the provincial and federal iterations of the Greens and NDP. There’s just some disconnect between supporters of the Trudeau Liberals and the Crombie Liberals.
In short, had the OLP converted more Trudeau Liberals in Milton, they might have been able to win the byelection.
Now, it’s also possible that the pool of voters available to the Ontario Liberals would be higher if Justin Trudeau was more popular in the province. The unpopularity of the federal Liberals might be giving the Ontario Liberals a lower ceiling than they’d otherwise have.
But blame for political failure usually lies closer to home. The federal Liberal brand is significantly more popular than the provincial version in Quebec, as well as in Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia (at least according to the limited federal/provincial polls we have for those provinces). It wouldn’t make much sense for those provincial parties to blame Trudeau for their poor showings, while in New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador the provincial brand is doing better than the federal brand, largely due to the local context.
It would very likely help Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals if Justin Trudeau was just a tad more popular. But it would probably help a lot more if Bonnie Crombie was, too.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News on what B.C. fundraising tells us about how prepared the B.C. Conservatives are for the upcoming campaign. Plus, the federal Conservatives break fundraising records, the Ontario PCs win two byelections and there’s news out of the provincial scenes in Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island.
Polls show a widening Conservative lead, plus numbers on Trudeau’s potential leadership replacements, feelings on the budget and voting intentions in British Columbia.
An expanded Conservative majority, a reduced B.C. NDP majority if the elections were held today.
A real riding to watch (and photograph) in this week’s riding profile.
A look back at the 1979 B.C. election in the #EveryElectionProject.