Will the NB Liberals buck the anti-Liberal national trend?
Susan Holt and the Liberals appear to be the favourites in New Brunswick.
The winner of British Columbia’s election is still up in the air as some 49,000 ballots have yet to be counted. We won’t know the results until the final count is completed week.
New Brunswickers know a thing or two about tight elections. In 2018, the PCs and Liberals were within one seat of each other. But at least they knew what the results were on election night — it was the machinations in the legislature that took weeks to settle.
The province could find itself in a similar situation at the end of the count tonight. Or it could find itself with a clear winner early on. Just as in B.C., where the two most plausible outcomes were either a toss-up or a clear NDP victory, the New Brunswick cat in Schrödinger’s ballot box seems to be either a close toss-up between the PCs and Liberals, or a comfortable Liberal victory.
We’ll have to wait until the boxes are opened tonight to find out which it is.
Alright — enough for tortured metaphors. The fact of the matter is that the polling data out of New Brunswick has been thin and it is difficult to make a confident prediction with so few numbers to base it on. What we have seen, however, points to a Liberal victory. Only two provincewide polls were published in the last days of the campaign, giving the Liberals a lead of nine to 10 points over the Progressive Conservatives, while polling in the three biggest cities of Moncton, Saint John and Fredericton all suggest the Liberals are poised to make significant gains.
Those three datapoints make the Liberals the favourites. It is hard to imagine that the PCs can win if they truly are nine or 10 points back or if they have lost as much ground in the three biggest cities as Mainstreet Research, Forum Research and Narrative Research suggest. If the PCs pull off a win, it’ll be due to something not picked up in the polls.
At least, not picked up in the few polls that have been published.
If, instead, the polls are right and Susan Holt’s Liberals do win either a minority or majority government, then they will have bucked a national trend that has dragged down the federal Liberals, along with many of their provincial cousins.
Join me and Philippe J. Fournier for our livestream of the New Brunswick election results, tonight starting at 7 PM ET / 8 PM AT!
Let’s dive into the few numbers we have and see why the Liberals appear to be the favourite going into this election, why the PCs have an uphill (but not insurmountable) mountain to climb, and why the fate of the New Brunswick Greens could prove to be a decisive factor in the outcome.