The Candice Malcolm Show - September 20, 2021


Can the polls be trusted？

Topics
polls and voter turnout
Hosted by
Candice Malcolm
Guests
True North's Hamish
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Erin O'Toole Derek Sloan Edmonton Greaseback Calgary Skyview Edmonton Centre Maxime Bernier Jason Kenney Marshall Scheer
The legacy media regurgitates Liberal talking points again and again The Conservative strategy failed. There needs to be a reckoning.

Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

191.08

Word count

3,372

Sentence count

188

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

It's election day, and how accurate are the polls? Candice and Hamish take a deep dive into the polls and give their predictions for tonight's vote. Plus, a look at the impact of a lower voter turnout on the outcome of the election.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It's election day, but how accurate are the polls? I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is the Candice Welcome Show.
00:00:09.560 Everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. It's election day. We're really excited. Over here at True North, we're going to have a live election show broadcast to you this entire evening, starting at 8.30 p.m. Eastern Time.
00:00:20.460 We will be live on Facebook and on YouTube, so you can tune in, see everything as it's rolling in. We'll be announcing the writings. We'll be letting you know who's ahead. We'll be giving analysis and opinion and just chock full of really, really entertaining content.
00:00:36.220 So please tune in tonight. As for today, I want to get a little bit deeper into the polls, what they're showing, what the predictions are, and how it's going to play out tonight.
00:00:46.860 So to get a little bit deeper into that, I am joined by True North's Hamish Marshall. Hi, Hamish. How are you?
00:00:52.600 Hi, Candice. How are you?
00:00:54.140 Good, good. Excited. I think it's going to be an interesting night. Although I will say that some people are calling this the most boring election in Canadian history.
00:01:02.380 Now, there have been a lot of boring elections in the past, but nothing has really stood out. Even today on Election Day, I don't really know what the ballot box question will be.
00:01:10.840 So I think that the prediction is that that's going to impact voter turnout. What are you seeing in terms of voter turnout and what do you think it's going to look like today?
00:01:20.840 Yeah. You know, it's difficult to predict voter turnout at the best of times. Generally speaking, the polls seem to indicate a lower enthusiasm to vote, which usually turns into lower turnout.
00:01:32.740 But we saw a big increase in the advanced polls. 5.6 million people voted in the advanced polls. Probably, when it's all said and done, close to a million will have voted by mail.
00:01:40.680 So those are huge, huge increases. Now, partly that's due to the pandemic. It's also, over the last 20 years, advanced polls have seen a general increase in turnout as it's become easier and easier to vote.
00:01:52.080 And people just want to get it out of the way over that four-day advanced poll period.
00:01:56.160 So it's all balanced. It's hard to say how it all balances out. But I think turnout, generally looking at it, it's probably going to be a bit down from last time.
00:02:04.400 But, you know, some people are predicting quite low turnout, millions less people voting. I think that's reasonably unlikely as well.
00:02:12.100 And so what will a lower voter turnout, or at least a moderately lower voter turnout, mean for the parties? Is it good news for the Tories, good news for the Liberals? What do you think?
00:02:21.360 Well, it actually really, really depends who isn't motivated to turn out. Because a lower turnout doesn't sink all boats evenly to destroy a metaphor.
00:02:31.920 It's really, if certain parties are less or more motivated, that could have a big impact.
00:02:39.720 And traditionally speaking, though, conservative parties that are taking power do better in larger turnout.
00:02:48.940 That people who are mad come out and vote, who typically don't vote.
00:02:52.880 So usually what you see is, you know, when the Conservatives come into power, the turnout goes up.
00:02:59.540 But when also when Justin Trudeau won in 2015, turnout went up because there was people who are non-regular voters who are fired up and say, I'm going to vote this time.
00:03:09.720 So generally speaking, a lower turnout is probably not great for the opposition parties.
00:03:15.080 But on the other hand, as we've seen, you know, the Liberals, while they might have a slight lead in the polls, it's not enough to make them feel particularly comfortable either.
00:03:24.080 Interesting. And also, given what we know about COVID and the sort of people who are really spooked by it, they tend to be Liberal voters, or at least more on the left side, progressive side of the political spectrum.
00:03:33.140 So if people aren't voting because they're worried about COVID, I think that would probably also be better news for the Tories.
00:03:40.360 But I don't know as much as this more speculation.
00:03:45.420 I wanted to point your attention to this McLean's seat projection that was released over the weekend, that according to this, it shows that the Liberals are set to win a very narrow victory, losing seats from their count last time.
00:04:01.100 So this has the Liberals poised to win 148 seats down from 157 in 2019, the Conservatives winning approximately 112 seats down from 121 in 2019.
00:04:13.460 And so that's all because it shows the NDP really surging, nearly doubling their seats from 24 up to 42, and the bloc winning about 35.
00:04:22.660 Is this sort of in line with the numbers that you're crunching, or what do you think of this production here?
00:04:27.900 Yeah, I think this production is not bad. I think it's pretty good. And there's a couple of caveats.
00:04:33.080 Number one, we've seen the NDP numbers in the polls soften a little bit over the weekend.
00:04:39.520 So while a lot of polls late last week were showing them at 20, 21, even some, I think one of them had about 22%, we're now seeing, I think somebody had them at 17 and a half yesterday.
00:04:48.080 So now seeing them waft down into the teens a little bit, they're still going to pick up seats.
00:04:51.980 They got 16% last time. So even if they only got 18 or 19%, they're going to pick up seats, but maybe not quite as many as if they were, you know, at 21.
00:05:00.980 The other thing is that the bloc at 35, bloc 132 seats last time, there's a lot of seats they could that are close,
00:05:09.840 but it is worth noting that no pollsters had the bloc getting more votes than they did last time in a week.
00:05:15.220 So they're certainly not on track to lose a lot of seats, but I could see the bloc, frankly, netting out about the same, ending up at 32 seats.
00:05:25.340 So I think 35 is about as good as it gets for the bloc.
00:05:28.320 And if they ended up at 33 or 31, I wouldn't be surprised about that either.
00:05:33.640 And the likely beneficiary of certainly of the bloc not quite getting 35 is probably two or three more liberal seats.
00:05:41.240 The NDP doesn't do quite as well. It's both liberals and conservatives who can profit from that.
00:05:47.280 There's a bunch of seats that the NDP can take off the conservatives, but they're also taking a bunch of seats off the liberals.
00:05:53.140 And so with this projection, I mean, I've seen it sort of go both ways.
00:05:56.880 It could be a very narrow liberal victory or a very narrow conservative victory.
00:06:01.280 So let's hone in on that conservative vote.
00:06:03.600 So I've read, again, just really a mixed bag, but some polls show that the conservatives are doing really strong in British Columbia,
00:06:12.520 that because of the NDP surge, that there's a lot of three-way races where the conservatives could be the beneficiaries,
00:06:17.760 and that Erin O'Toole is polling nearly twice as well in Ontario as Scheer was in 2019.
00:06:25.380 So how are the conservatives looking?
00:06:27.820 What is the likelihood of Erin O'Toole winning the popular vote and winning the most number of seats tonight? 1.00
00:06:33.600 I think the likelihood of both those things is relatively small.
00:06:38.620 He's got a better chance of winning the popular vote.
00:06:42.820 The general consensus in the polls in Ontario is that the conservatives are maybe doing a little bit better than last time,
00:06:52.580 but not enough to make a huge difference in terms of seat count.
00:06:57.300 And also the polls seem to have them doing a little bit better in Quebec in terms of votes.
00:07:02.000 It probably won't make any difference at all to the conservative seat count in Quebec.
00:07:05.620 But on the flip side, doing this considerably worse in Alberta and Saskatchewan,
00:07:10.560 that means that winning the popular vote is going to be tricky, although it is mathematically possible.
00:07:15.860 The other big thing that's going to happen, as we've discussed before, is that the Greens are only running candidates in three quarters of the ridings.
00:07:22.480 So if you look across the country and you look at what the polls are saying for the Greens, it varies.
00:07:27.720 But let's say on average they're around four percent.
00:07:30.500 If they're pulling four percent, they're probably going to get three percent.
00:07:34.080 And the liberals are going to be a big beneficiary for that.
00:07:36.160 So I expect the liberals are going to outperform their polling average by maybe half a point, three quarters of a point,
00:07:42.440 which could make a difference in a whole bunch of races.
00:07:44.660 So that's something that has to be considered as well.
00:07:48.780 And then the big X factor is the PPC.
00:07:52.300 Well, OK, let's let's jump right into the PPC, because we saw a sort of last minute appeal by a lot of people in Team Tory
00:08:00.220 that a vote for Maxime Bernier is basically a vote for Justin Trudeau.
00:08:04.220 And we've seen this line of thinking so much in Canadian politics.
00:08:08.140 So what's happening with the PPC?
00:08:11.160 Where are they in the polls last time you checked?
00:08:13.680 And what do you suspect will happen?
00:08:16.380 Will they win any seats?
00:08:17.180 Will they be the big spoiler?
00:08:18.660 What's going to happen there?
00:08:20.040 I think they're more likely to be the big spoiler than win any seats.
00:08:23.100 They're doing, you know, they 1.6 percent of the vote last time.
00:08:27.300 They're going to do considerably better than that.
00:08:28.920 I think they can certainly will top four percent nationwide, probably five.
00:08:33.800 And in English Canada, that number is going to be higher.
00:08:35.920 And there are certain parts of rural, southwestern central Ontario, where I think we can see the PPC do a very significant, significant results.
00:08:46.840 And in Alberta as well, you know, a lot of the anger about Jason Kenney's handling of the of the pandemic,
00:08:55.120 I think for people who don't want more lockdowns or vaccine mandates or vaccine passports is going to appear as a PPC vote today.
00:09:06.420 The other thing that's interesting is that the PPC, there seems to be this attitude that I keep running into.
00:09:15.280 People saying, well, the PPC voters, they're all going to go back to the Tories at the last minute, or they're all going to they're not going to bother voting.
00:09:21.540 They're sort of people who don't vote that much, which I think is is wishful thinking on behalf of conservative activists.
00:09:27.820 It's not strong and advanced poll data is not not a particularly strong way of predicting what's going on.
00:09:35.940 But there are some indications, the advanced poll data that the PPC has gotten a good chunk of vote in the advanced polls,
00:09:42.460 that we've seen surges in advanced polls in areas that we expect the PPC to do well.
00:09:48.000 So I think the PPC is going to do a reasonably well, I think they're going to cost the conservatives a bunch of seats to put it in context,
00:09:54.600 when the PPC was at 1.6% last time, cost the conservatives, depending how you you added it up, five, probably six seats in the last election.
00:10:04.680 So if they're at three times that if they're at five point something percent, I don't know if it'll cost conservatives three times as many seats.
00:10:12.020 But if 1.6 cost them six seats, 5% is going to cost them more than that.
00:10:16.600 Interesting. Well, one of the things that I wonder about is, you know, if the support is strongest, say, in in parts of southern Alberta or Alberta, will that translate into a seat?
00:10:27.940 Will they will they pull out a seat in Alberta and otherwise?
00:10:31.380 I mean, I hate to say it, but there's not really an opportunity for vote splitting in some of those writings because they're so staunchly conservative that the conservatives could go from getting 80 percent of the vote or I don't know if they got 80, get 70 percent of the vote down to 40 percent of the vote.
00:10:45.900 And it wouldn't make a difference. You'd still elect a Tory MP.
00:10:49.320 So would it really make a difference of what what parts of the country might a PPC voter play spoiler?
00:10:58.280 And then also another question, Hamish, is some of the criticism of the PPC is that they lack the sort of machine, political machine that many of the big parties have.
00:11:09.360 And part of that political machine is just the get out the vote, the go TV strategy on Election Day, having volunteers, driving people to polling stations, making sure that everyone knows that today is Election Day and that they have to get to the poll.
00:11:22.520 The idea or the thought out there is that the PPC just doesn't have that kind of infrastructure.
00:11:28.940 They don't have that kind of political organization and that could hurt them today.
00:11:32.820 So is that the case?
00:11:34.440 Well, I think your first point, you're right.
00:11:36.440 I don't think the PPC is going to win any seats in rural Alberta and I don't think there's any seats in rural Alberta or rural Saskatchewan where the other parties are close enough to the conservatives and the PPC can cost on those seats.
00:11:47.060 I would say, though, is that if the PPC are doing well in rural Alberta, that means that doesn't mean they're not going to get any votes in Calgary and Edmonton.
00:11:54.900 And there are seats like Calgary Skyview or Edmonton Centre or Edmonton Griesbach where, you know, shaving off three, four or five percent of the conservative.
00:12:05.100 You know, they might get 10 or 12 percent in rural Alberta, but they get five or six percent in Edmonton.
00:12:10.060 And that could cost the conservatives some seats in that city, for instance, or maybe a Calgary Centre or a Calgary Skyview as well.
00:12:18.380 And in Ontario, I think I just don't think we can rule out the PPC's strength, particularly in rural Ontario, southwestern Ontario.
00:12:27.180 So there's a seat like Essex.
00:12:29.220 You know, Essex is a tight conservative NDP switching seat.
00:12:33.420 The conservatives won it off the NDP last time.
00:12:35.460 The NDP is obviously doing better and coming hard.
00:12:38.200 If PPC take three, four percent of the conservative vote there, we can expect the NDP to win that seat.
00:12:45.640 You know, there's seats like Derek Sloan's old seat where, you know, Derek's only won it over the liberals by three, three and a half percent last time.
00:12:56.840 The PPC number, PPC is getting a good number of votes there.
00:13:00.560 It means the liberals will almost certainly win that seat on the split.
00:13:02.820 It also means it's harder for the conservatives to pick up some seats that they're trying to do in rural and ex-urban Ontario.
00:13:10.080 So I think it puts a cap on the ability of the conservatives to grow in Ontario as well.
00:13:17.020 In terms of the PPC's organization, it's true.
00:13:19.980 They certainly don't have the organization that the traditional large parties have.
00:13:25.560 And that organization certainly makes a difference in very close elections.
00:13:28.900 You know, if you're down to five or six hundred votes between your parties, having a great organization makes a huge difference.
00:13:34.820 If you're winning by five thousand votes or losing by five thousand votes, having a huge volunteer get-out-the-vote team is helpful, but it's not going to make the difference.
00:13:44.820 So I don't think the PPC, you know, look, if the PPC end up losing a seat by a couple hundred votes, it absolutely can be taken down to lack of organization.
00:13:54.720 But I don't see anything with the possible exception of Bernier's seat, where the PPC's actually got a chance to win a seat.
00:14:03.920 Everything I'm seeing is that they are, their vote is, they don't have, with one or two exceptions, they don't really have star candidates.
00:14:11.880 They don't have, you know, it would be different if it was, you know, in some community that got, the person who had been warden of the county for 10 years was deciding to run for the PPC and have good name recognition.
00:14:21.280 And there were some local motivating issues that they could build on top of the PPC's other issue set.
00:14:27.540 Nobody I know can point, can name a single PPC candidate besides Maxime Bernier.
00:14:32.580 And they really don't have any sort of local heroes like that.
00:14:35.880 In fact, in the last election, they were in better position because they had some former Conservative MPs and former Conservative candidates who were running for them.
00:14:43.340 They don't seem to have that this time. And I think that makes it harder for them to outperform in certain areas where a good organization could make the difference.
00:14:53.720 Interesting. Yeah. Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see. I know a couple of the candidates, but that's mostly just from our own TNC coverage.
00:15:00.780 And yeah, it should be interesting. Well, Hamish, you're going to be joining us for a live show tonight.
00:15:07.820 I just one final question. What are you going to be looking out for? What are the big indicators?
00:15:11.940 I know you did the 45 ridings to watch for True North and you've done sort of in-depth analysis.
00:15:17.300 But what are there any sort of major trends or are there any specific ridings that you're looking at that when the polls close and those votes come in,
00:15:25.400 that that will be the sort of like turning point in terms of who's going to win this thing?
00:15:29.220 Yeah, so I think there's two different stages. You know, Atlantic Canada closes much earlier in the night and then everywhere from Quebec to Alberta closes at the same time at 9.30 Eastern.
00:15:42.840 So those Atlantic Canada results, we're going to have them for an hour or something before the rest of the country comes in, exception to BC.
00:15:52.400 And so in Atlantic Canada, you know, tool people have some great hopes in Nova Scotia in particular.
00:16:03.760 I expect the Conservatives to do reasonably well in New Brunswick, but Nova Scotia is going to be very, very interesting.
00:16:08.580 If the Conservatives do well in Nova Scotia, pick up two or three seats, I think we can expect that they're going to overperform nationally.
00:16:16.500 So that's the first sort of thing I'm going to look at. And then following that, once we get into, you know, the chunk of Canada stretches from the Rockies to the Baie de Chaleur,
00:16:29.660 I think we're, I'm looking at a couple of seats where there are block Liberal switcher seats to see if the block is going to go up,
00:16:37.000 if that 35% in the projection is right for the block, or if they're likely to end up around where they were last time,
00:16:43.780 or you may even lose a seat to Liberals. If the Liberals are winning some of the seats there,
00:16:47.200 they could really pass them for losses elsewhere.
00:16:49.140 In Ontario, I'm looking at a seat like a Whitby to see if the Conservatives can break through in those sort of pure play suburbia 905 seats.
00:16:58.640 And then looking for the PPC in the Southwest and in the Western parts of the country as well.
00:17:04.980 Great. Well, it's going to be a really exciting night. Regardless, we're excited to have you part of the team.
00:17:09.200 You're going to be breaking down the results as they come in and manning the decision desk.
00:17:13.700 So you'll be doing the big calls for us. We're really excited.
00:17:16.180 We're going to be live in a few hours starting at 8.30 p.m. Eastern.
00:17:19.060 So make sure you come back to YouTube or Facebook and watch that.
00:17:23.580 And if you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to hit the subscribe button, hit the like button and continue finding our content here at Trenorth.
00:17:30.820 Hamish, thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you again shortly.
00:17:33.700 My pleasure. It's going to be a great night.
00:17:35.660 All right. Thank you so much. I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.