Carney's popularity dips - Liberal look shaky before debates!
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Summary
Wyatt Claypool breaks down the latest polling numbers from Abacus Data and takes a look at where things stand for the Liberals heading into Thursday's debate. He also takes a deep dive into why Mark Carney could lose the election if he underperforms in the debates.
Transcript
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Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. So Mark Carney is going into the federal election debates tomorrow and Thursday in a far more vulnerable position than he was in last week.
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Last week, the liberals were actually doing quite well. In the polls, I trust, they were leading by four to six points, and that was because of the Trump Liberation Day tariff announcement.
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That is a great news cycle for the liberals to play off of because they are running a mostly anti-Trump, anti-American campaign.
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Since the Liberation Day tariffs have basically just been dropped and the only ones remaining on Canada are in part because of Carney's stupidity in negotiating,
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they are now in a not-so-hot position right before Carney has to debate in French today, and then we have the English debate tomorrow.
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The Green Party actually got dropped from both debates because they didn't meet the requirements.
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While they do have two sitting MPs, they didn't have candidates and 90% of the ridings that they were planning on contesting.
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I say planning on contesting because the Bloc Québécois obviously just means 90% of ridings in Quebec because it's standing in the elections,
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and they also have enough of a percentage of the vote. I think that also overrides that.
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But I'm not sure if that's going to be a good thing or a bad thing for the liberals to not have the Greens on stage.
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It does mean that all the other leaders have more speaking time to attack Carney,
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and they don't have to share it with some unsubstantial Green Party leader.
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At the same time, I'm wondering if in the French debate it would have been good to have even more people on stage
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who all have far better French than Carney, because it's more embarrassing to have the worst French out of five people
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But now, I want to get into the numbers and demonstrate to you where Mark Carney could easily start losing this election
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Before I get into it, though, guys, just a reminder to like this video if you've been liking my federal election coverage.
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Leave a comment. I like to hear what people think on the topics of the day.
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And subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber and you want to keep up with my reporting each day.
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So here is the latest numbers from Abacus Data.
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And Abacus Data, by the way, has always been the pollster to this entire election cycle I've put the most trust into.
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Even last week, when they had the conservatives down by six points, I would still tell you that they are a good pollster.
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It just reflected that the news cycle was particularly good for the Carney liberals.
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And in fact, what I think we've been hitting, as you can see here, this week the liberals are at 40%, conservatives 38, NDP 11, block 7, People's Party 2.
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In fact, I think that the People's Party might not even get 1%.
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So this is a very bad position for the liberals to be in.
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In fact, I ran these numbers in the 338 election simulator as closely as I could get them because they only allowed you to slide the bars within their own confidence interval.
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I couldn't quite put the Bloc Québécois up to 7.
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But if I put the numbers around this, even giving the liberals 4.5% and the conservatives just a flat 38, this, in fact, 40% liberal, 38% conservative, 11 NDP, and 7 Bloc, results in a conservative minority government.
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And again, I'm not just saying this because it's wishful thinking.
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Just when you're on the ground campaigning, I am in Nepean, the riding Mark Carney is running, and I'm helping Barbara Ball.
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In this riding, it doesn't feel like this is going to be an election where conservatives only get 38%.
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But I think the conservatives are going to be able to get 40.
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And so let's just go down a little bit deeper and show what's happening.
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Well, I just do want to note on the side there, you can see since last week, the liberals have actually lost 2%.
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I think you actually could see the NDP at 11% and the Bloc at 7%.
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That's realistic because of all the scandals going on for the liberals right now.
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What I was going to mention earlier, sorry if I'm a little bit scattered-brained,
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but I think why also the liberals were able to get ahead last week and it didn't feel like things were really affecting them negatively,
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the bad things that were happening on the campaign,
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were because of the fact that critical mass hadn't been hit yet.
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Justin Trudeau was a terrible liberal leader and prime minister.
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And when Carney started having a few scandals, I think people who were planning on voting liberal were still willing to think,
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well, he's new, people make mistakes, but he's still much different than Justin Trudeau.
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This week, we were hit by like 5 new scandals for Carney on top of the dozen we had before.
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Now I think you're going to start peeling away at liberal voters along the margins thinking,
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He is willing to engage in the exact same unethical behavior.
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Here is the chart for people certain to vote, and this should also scare the liberals.
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Certain to vote, the conservatives are actually leading.
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The conservatives are at 40%, the liberals are at 39%, NDP at 12%,
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This would be a pretty large minority government for the conservatives, if not cusping on a majority.
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Because the problem here for the liberals is that when the Bloc Québécois are at 7%,
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but if the Bloc Québécois are also maintaining what they had before,
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the liberal gains are mostly just in Montreal where they already win all the seats.
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Or they might get a little bit higher in Quebec City,
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or they might get a little bit higher in northern Quebec.
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But Quebec's one of those weird provinces, and there's a few other provinces like it.
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where certain regions go for a certain party so hard
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that the polls have to shift wildly in favor of one party over the other
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We have, the NDP cannot win elections in Saskatchewan very easily,
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because after they win all of Saskatoon and all of Regina,
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And those seats are like 50 plus percent Saskatchewan party,
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and even then there's some other right-wing parties that end up getting 2% or 3% or 4%,
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So you can imagine that the NDP have to gain massively in the polls
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in order to unlock any of those rural seats, and that's the same thing in Quebec.
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The arm of Quebec that's along the main U.S. border,
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that's very conservative, and it's not going to stop being conservative.
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There are a couple seats in Quebec, or the Conservatives, or Quebec City,
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that they win, but the next best party to win those would be the Bloc Québécois.
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And the Liberals then win the island of Montreal by dictatorship numbers for the Liberals.
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The Liberals usually don't win ridings by massive, massive numbers,
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but in Montreal, they can win seats by above 50%.
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that means they're winning sometimes these seats by 65%.
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It doesn't mean they're winning any of the Bloc Québécois suburbs.
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They need to be near 50% to actually start unlocking a lot of these Quebec ridings.
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if they come in at 7%, it basically means the Liberals made no gains.
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And because many of the Liberals' national polling gains have been in Quebec,
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it means that in the rest of Canada, they're sucking.
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They're getting blown out by the Conservatives,
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and that is when Nepean is absolutely in play and Carney could lose his own seat.
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and the Conservatives don't do that well in Quebec,
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which means they're far more outside of Quebec.
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So now let's go down to another part of this poll that is very interesting.
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But if the Bloc Québécois can maintain that 32%,
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it means all that 39% is all concentrated in Montreal.
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That was a very good news cycle for the Liberals.
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Now that we're out of the Liberation tariff talk from the United States,
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He has jumped up by a 4% on his disapproval rating,
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and his approval rating has slipped from 48 to 45.
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Naturally, it takes people a while to kind of change their minds on leaders.
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So the one thing that Carney does have going for him is there's only a couple of weeks left for people to change their minds on the man.
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And the problem, though, is early voting hasn't really started yet.
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And so what he's having to do is he's having to try at his darndest in this debate to have it not slip anymore.
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Because if people start wavering on him, that's what could suppress his early vote turnout.
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Because even those who like him, if he has a bad debate performance,
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and maybe certain other people are already starting to go from approving to disapproving,
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maybe people don't show up for early voting because they don't really know what to think about him anymore,
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Whereas the Conservatives, the people who like the Polyev, really like him.
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And obviously, Polyev has a much higher disapproval and approval rating,
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When you actually add up Carney's approval and disapproval,
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there is a good third of Canadians who don't really know much about the man.
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When you go to Polyev, there's maybe like 10%, 15% who don't know what to think of him,
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and they're probably just neutral observers at that point.
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A big turnaround from a couple weeks ago, where he only had 38% approval and 44% disapproval.
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This is the thing that this election is all about.
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If the election becomes about Donald Trump, the Liberals win.
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If the election becomes about the economy, the Conservatives win.
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And the good thing for the Conservatives is that as time has been going on,
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what people want the election to be about has gone from Trump to mostly economic issues.
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If the election is between dealing with Donald Trump and delivering change and policy direction,
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it started back in late March, 54% people wanted it to be about Trump, 46% wanted it to be about change.
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Other polls already had the cost of living issues leading or dealing with the economic growth.
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Those two framings were already beating Trump, but they have since then increased their share by a little bit.
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And what you have to remember, too, is that the NDP are also competing on the anti-Trump side.
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And so because they're doing that, that means if the election is about Trump and the economy
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and the Conservatives are leading with the people who care about the economy,
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Carney and the Liberals, by the late stages of the election,
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might be having to split 45% of the vote with the NDP.
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And so they're just hoping that the NDP comes in real low with their own support.
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Because if the NDP comes in at 8%, 9%, or 10%, the Liberals can't win.
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Because the NDP puts a massive drag on the Liberals in Ontario and Manitoba and Vancouver,
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where they need to, or BC, although most of the Liberal seats are just in Vancouver.
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Those are the areas the NDP put a drag on them.
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And then obviously the bloc, if they can come in at 6%, 7%, or 8%,
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they put a massive drag on the Liberal seat count in Quebec.
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40% of the vote is the Liberals and come in with only 120 seats if your regionals suck.
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And right now the regionals are not looking great for the Liberals.
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And so if Carney has a bad debate performance here, he comes in a little weak
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and his numbers start softening even more, probably can't win anymore.
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I want to pull up this one chart from Angus Reid.
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I've even explained before why they're sampling over samples Liberals.
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So the people who they poll disproportionately fly, which means they disproportionately work white-collar jobs
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or are kind of the jet-setting crowd who are more prone to being liberal.
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And so even then, when they have the Conservatives only falling behind in their poll by four or five points,
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I consider that a win, considering who they're polling.
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But even their polls, and this part should be accurate because they're just saying,
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of the people who are voting Conservative and of the people who are voting Liberal,
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While all the parties have been increasing over time, because naturally,
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if you are thinking about voting for a party long enough,
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you're eventually going to firm up your commitment to voting,
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the Conservatives are currently at 76% of people saying that they are definitely going to be voting for the Conservatives.
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Only 63%, less than two-thirds of Liberals, are very committed to voting Liberal.
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That is, again, why the debate matters so much.
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If Polioff can throw some doubt in these people's minds and they stay at 63%,
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they drop or they only go up a little bit more, so they're only 70% by election day,
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that means if the Liberals are at, let's say, the Liberals are at 42% of the vote
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and the Conservatives are at 40% in terms of polling,
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but the Conservatives draw out 90% of the people who are going to vote for them
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and the Liberals only draw out 80%, Conservatives win.
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Conservatives would have been by a landslide in that scenario.
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that there is absolutely not just a path for the Conservatives to win,
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but a very good path for the Conservatives to win.
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If Polioff has a good French and English debate performance,
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I think this is now an 80-20 election for the Conservatives to win.
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Right now, this is currently an election for Carney to lose.
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but you would say that Carney is still technically in the driver's seat
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based on what the most of the pollsters are saying.
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Again, when we go to the committed voter section of these polls,
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it looks like the Conservatives are doing better.
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Even advocates' data says those who are confident in their choice,
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it then leans 41% Conservative to 39% or 40%...
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Yes, it's only 1% difference, but that's where elections are won.
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Very few elections are won with somebody winning 50% of the vote
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That's where you're going to find the Conservative minority
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or majority government within that three-point margin.
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Anyways, so that should be it for me today, guys.
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and using it to contextualize what we're seeing.
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to talk more about the election, to talk about Carney's campaign.
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I will be breaking down the French debate tomorrow.
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what I think about the translators speaking for the candidates.
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But I will try and live-stream the English debate tomorrow on Thursday.
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So anyways, with that being said, I'll see you guys later.