Wyatt Claypool breaks down the latest polls and gives us a glimpse into the race between the BC NDP and BC Tories, and why the race is so close and so close yet so close. He also gives his analysis on why the B.C. NDP campaign is running out of gas, and what it can do to turn things around.
00:00:47.600In January, you would have polls in BC saying that the BC NDP were leading by 28%.
00:00:55.000They were leading the next closest party by 28%.
00:00:59.320And now we are in a race where, depending on the pollster, they are either down significantly or barely up on the Conservatives.
00:01:07.920And I think it's telling that Main Street Research, which has had the Conservatives leading for about the last 10 days or so by anywhere from one point all the way up to five points, they, in fact, even have the Conservatives today leading by five points, that the rest of the pollsters who had the NDP up last week by five points, they've significantly tightened.
00:01:27.480I think it's, I was saying the names combined, either it was Polaro or Pallas, who last week had the NDP up five, now just throw out a poll saying one.
00:01:52.040They lose the popular vote, but they win on seats.
00:01:54.120But I think that a lot of the pollsters realize that their polls for the NDP might have been a little bit too hawkish.
00:02:01.420And so what you do is you herd towards the mean, and the mean has been more towards Main Street's plus fives for the Conservatives, so to not look silly by having it be a Conservative blowout, you know, say it's basically a tie like Pallas just did.
00:02:15.240Maybe that's legitimately what their poll said, but that's kind of how it works.
00:02:18.760But in the last few days of the B.C. provincial election, I think there has been a significant difference in the energy levels between the two parties.
00:02:29.300John Rustad finished off last night speaking in front of 2,000 people in a banquet hall in Surrey, and David Eby apparently was in Surrey earlier in the day doing some, I guess, campaign office visits, and then ran back to Yaletown.
00:02:45.140I believe a rioting that's probably not even going to be won by the B.C. NDP to do this rally where they had one of the communications directors for B.C. United say,
00:02:55.100I took out a B.C. NDP membership so I could vote for them on Election Day, which somebody should tell him that you actually don't need to buy a membership to vote in these elections.
00:03:25.940And it seems like David Eby's organization has just run out of gas.
00:03:29.660I don't think they know where they need to go in the province that's most effective for them.
00:03:33.240They've been keeping a lot of their time all kind of bottled up in Surrey, going back to Vancouver ridings that I've seen where there's no chance they're going to lose some of these areas.
00:03:43.060But for some reason, David Eby's like puttering around in ridings where the NDP should be winning by 10, 15 percent.
00:03:50.360Most of the remaining race in B.C. in terms of places that are toss ups or undecided, we don't know where they're going to go, is not actually in Surrey.
00:03:59.600Southern Surrey could go significantly conservative, but the real path to victory, at least in my mind, is through Maple Ridge, Coquitlam, Port Moody actually could go conservative.
00:04:10.100The demographics on that riding are set up to be more conservative.
00:04:14.460And maybe I can show you a little bit or maybe I won't show it on screen because I don't want to show all of Main Street's data everywhere.
00:04:19.660But in this last day, the last day poll that Main Street just released shows that there is a lead for the B.C. conservatives among all income brackets.
00:04:30.000People making 50,000 less, 51,000, 75,000, I think 75 to 100 and then 100 plus.
00:04:36.320Those groups are all going conservative, whether it's just by 1 percent margin over the NDP all the way up to 12 percent lead.
00:04:43.340And even the university educated bachelor degree holders who usually go more B.C. and D.B. have also tightened up with the conservatives.
00:04:51.540But the conservatives, I hate when my videos jump scare me by autoplaying.
00:04:57.700But the but the biggest lead the conservatives have, I think it's the real divide in British Columbia.
00:05:02.860It's between the people who have sociology degrees and the people who are, you know, have trade degrees in plumbing, like they're electricians, whatnot.
00:05:12.040They went to a trade school or college.
00:05:14.480Those people are voting for the conservatives over the NDP by a margin of 20 percent.
00:05:20.640The conservatives have a 20 percent lead with people who work in trades, went to trade colleges, all that sort of thing.
00:05:27.120That's insane. High school or less also has a big lead, a big 11 point lead for the conservatives.
00:05:33.460And what you even have to know about the polls, even the polls that are showing the conservatives up, even those tend to have a little bit more of an NDP bias.
00:05:42.060Again, as I've been saying throughout a lot of these videos, teachers, plumbers, electricians, restaurateurs, small business owners, a lot of these types of people don't answer polls.
00:05:52.260Who's going to even if it's a five minute IVR poll?
00:05:54.260None of these people in the middle of their day really have time to sit there listening to a robotic voice telling them what their what the questions are and what their answer options are.
00:06:03.000They they they don't have the time that like a public sector worker does or student or retiree.
00:06:09.520And most retirees, in fact, when they do answer polls, it tends to be more NDP.
00:06:15.120But we know that the retiree group in general tends to actually be more conservative in their real voting patterns.
00:06:24.500I think I ballpark this election to be a 75 percent chance the conservatives win 25 for the NDP.
00:06:30.680And that 25 represents if there was a massive polling error.
00:06:34.360And maybe I'm just confused and everyone hates us.
00:06:36.640But I've been doing a lot of door knocking in a lot of different places, ridings where we were significantly ahead, ridings where we were behind.
00:06:54.740It would be shocking to me that a lot of people show up to basically maintain this government as if it's done anything for them.
00:07:00.940Maybe media propaganda really works and people say, oh, well, that conservative candidate said something I didn't like nine years ago, and that's what's going to cause them to flip.
00:07:10.500But in general, I think the problems are too bad.
00:07:13.640There's homeless drug addicts dying on the streets and somebody's going to get offended by a joke that a candidate made from the conservatives.
00:07:21.440And also, this is why I think we're going to be picking up Richmond.
00:07:24.600Right now, the conservatives have, I think, about 55% to 60%, depending on if you add in undecideds or take them away, of the East Asian vote.
00:07:33.980That is the plurality of Richmond, is people who are Chinese, Korean, Japanese.
00:07:38.380And the conservatives are absolutely smashing that specific voting demographic.
00:07:42.460That's why I think Port Moody Berquitlam is in play, even though some models show the NDP winning it by five or six points.
00:07:48.520The problem is that riding is white and Asian, and those are two demographic groups that the BC conservatives are, in fact, winning.
00:07:56.620And that's when Surrey becomes a big question mark, because South Asian people, probably smarter than the rest of us, don't take polls because polls are, in fact, a little bit annoying to take.
00:09:41.080Well, unlike the people who deny climate change, I hope he wasn't implying there that if you, like, deny climate change, you should be locked up or punished.
00:09:49.000Or I guess he's saying that they're not going to face the consequences because it's going to be future generations.
00:09:53.660Honestly, whenever I've had a door, like, slammed in my face or somebody was rude to me in one of these writings I've been door knocking in, it's always this kind of, like, arrogant, I can do what I want kind of attitude.
00:10:05.760I always find those who consider themselves the most intelligent voters, the most compassionate, empathetic.
00:10:10.440Like, they're always the shortest tempered.
00:10:12.420They're always the nastiest, the cattiest.
00:10:15.140They think that you're evil so they can do and say what they want to you.
00:10:18.680I rarely really see anything from the other side that shows that a conservative woman was or a conservative man was, like, rude to a door knocker.
00:10:28.080Obviously, there's cranks on every side.
00:10:29.560But I always find that when I can tell someone's hardcore NDP, it's never like, you know, I'm voting NDP and I didn't like you guys doing this or that or I believe in this policy.
00:10:37.860It's always like, I don't vote conservative.
00:10:39.880It's this bad attitude that this is B.C., we vote NDP because we're smarter than you kind of a thing.
00:10:46.320Oh, we don't vote for far-right conservatives.
00:10:50.720And the thing is that I think it is demonstrative that if you watch a lot of mainstream media, you are the least educated voter, that you get the worst take on most of the current events in the province.
00:11:02.240I don't think that enough people who watch legacy media really know the extent to how bad the health care system is in this province, how much, like, wealth flight is taking place because of high tax and regulations.
00:11:14.800We lost 70,000 people last year to other provinces and the U.S. because of just how hard it is to operate a business in this province.
00:11:23.080And then David Eby arrogantly says, well, we had 150,000 people enter the province last year as well.
00:11:29.180Yeah, but they're not business owners.
00:11:30.900They're new people working low-wage jobs.
00:11:33.680And you can't build a province on government jobs and minimum-wage private sector work.
00:11:38.900You actually eventually need to lower people's taxes so they can invest in their own businesses.
00:11:42.820Oh, I don't know why I have to explain this.
00:11:45.460Like, you know, you can't actually clean up crime by giving out welfare checks.
00:11:58.540And that really is something that sums up David Eby's entire tenure as premier.
00:12:02.880It's just that, you know, we just want to enable people in the worst possible behavior and you're going to pay for it because you were nasty enough to actually build a business that's successful so you owe us now half your income.
00:12:16.700And this is what I've told to people multiple times.
00:12:29.660There's constantly just forms you have to file.
00:12:31.980Now, people jumping in the way of anything you're trying to do, trying to build a building in BC is impossible because there's so many extra inspections you have to do.
00:12:40.840There's so many extra codes and labor issues you have to deal with in order to get anything done.
00:12:46.200There's a reason why it's easier to build in Alberta.
00:12:48.100And people will be like, well, housing costs a lot everywhere.
00:12:51.000Yeah, but you guys are the worst for a reason.
00:12:52.740I even had a guy yesterday and I get his point.
00:12:55.080He says, well, you know, things in the province aren't that bad because things are starting to come back.
00:13:36.720Maybe actually before I go here, I will show you guys at least the model from today's polling.
00:13:42.740I'll show you it with the undecided still added in because there's a few people who might be able to make up their minds in the last day here.
00:13:49.000But we're down all the way to just 5% of people are undecided, which really shows you how undecided this race used to be.
00:13:57.380Because at the start, like 15 days ago or 20 days ago, it was common to see up to 17% of people undecided.
00:14:16.120I actually think another party are going to be a lot of BC Conservative voters just not wanting to say it because there is so much aggression against the Conservatives that you are going to find that silent Conservative voter.
00:14:27.960It actually happens in the US with Donald Trump when the media goes so hard after people for voting for a candidate that you're a bad person.
00:14:35.880You must be racist, you must be this, that, whatever, that some people start to stop wanting to tell anyone their opinion.
00:14:41.760They're going to vote Conservative, but they're going to tell pollsters either something different or they're going to say another party or they're just not going to answer the call because I don't want to deal with it.
00:14:51.280And so I think there is going to be a silent majority of people who are going to show up this election and put the Conservatives over the top.
00:14:56.700Because last election in 2020, early voting had about 671,000 people vote.
00:15:02.180And that was a COVID election where there was a lot of incentive for some people who were very COVID paranoid to show up and vote when the lines were a bit shorter, a little bit more sparsely populated.
00:15:13.580But this election, we have a million people, specifically a million and 1,000 people who voted early.
00:15:20.200And it sounds like there's still a lot more people who are going to be showing up and voting tomorrow.
00:15:24.260In fact, when you actually poll people on who haven't voted yet, it looks like the Conservatives at least have a slight edge with early voting.
00:15:30.280When you ask people, are you certain to vote?
00:15:32.460Those who have not voted, the certain to vote category, the Conservatives are leading by 12%.
00:15:37.880And then the likely to vote category, the NDP are a little bit more neck and neck.
00:15:42.120And then the unlikely to vote category, the NDP are leading the Conservatives.
00:15:46.480So like I was saying a few weeks ago, the thing that the NDP lead most on inside their base is crushing apathy.
00:15:53.920People don't run out of the House and vote to maintain a government.
00:15:57.040They vote, they run out of the House and vote for change.
00:16:00.120Low turnout elections tend to maintain governments because it's the supporters of that government,
00:16:05.080the people who vote frequently, who generally are pretty plugged in and know how like the state of the province,
00:16:11.600they show up in low turnout elections and they tend to reelect governments they think are doing a good job.
00:16:16.100High turnout is when people are dissatisfied.
00:16:18.640Nobody is so satisfied that they just want to go and vote in order to let the guys know.
00:17:07.640If you can't vote tomorrow, I believe you can go to a returning office in your riding and they let you basically just write in who you're going to vote for without having to do advanced or day of.
00:17:17.360So if you can't go tomorrow, go to your returning office, vote there, make sure all your kids voted, make sure your parents voted, make sure your friends voted,
00:17:25.020because it's not really like an election where you're going to be like, well, I don't want to ask her who she voted for.
00:17:30.600Oh my goodness, save yourself several thousands of dollars in taxes and make sure that they voted conservative so we actually can save the province and whatnot.