The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Danielle Smith crushes Nenshi in Alberta polls - Recalls fail miserably!

00:00:00.000 Ahoy everyone, Wyatt Claypool here, back with another Canadian polling update.

00:00:05.420 This time we will actually be talking about the province of Alberta,

00:00:09.020 which I haven't done a polling video on in about six months.

00:00:13.360 And this should be a really fun one, because while the federal polls are very back and forth

00:00:19.100 month to month between the Liberals and the Conservatives, in Alberta, us Albertans have

00:00:24.120 it right, and Premier Daniel Smith and the UCP are absolutely stomping out Nahid Nenshi

00:00:30.580 and the Alberta NDP.

00:00:32.540 Like, honestly, I always thought that Nenshi was going to perform better as the NDP leader

00:00:39.240 in Alberta, and I stupidly assumed that because he was elected three times as Calgary mayor

00:00:44.920 that that would translate to a lot of popularity, you know, province-wide.

00:00:49.980 But as my friend Chris from the Great Canadian Bagel Channel has pointed out, he's a fantastic

00:00:55.420 polling analyst, by the way, just because you got elected as a mayor doesn't actually mean

00:00:59.960 you're going to be popular across the whole province.

00:01:02.960 And in fact, it may not even indicate that you're even popular in the city that you used

00:01:07.460 to represent, because municipal races notoriously have very low turnout.

00:01:12.900 So really all Nenshi proved by being elected mayor of Calgary three times is that public sector

00:01:18.480 union workers really like him, and other people don't really vote in those elections.

00:01:23.240 And as soon as he stepped in as the Alberta NDP leader, which he won by a landslide, like

00:01:28.240 he easily was elected the Alberta NDP leader, he is bottomed out hard.

00:01:33.840 And I think it's because he's trying to run for Premier as if he's running for mayor, basically

00:01:38.720 trying to corner progressive voters everywhere, the corner of the market on progressive voters,

00:01:43.180 but that doesn't really work in a province like Alberta.

00:01:46.100 And frankly, it probably wouldn't even work in a province like Ontario or British Columbia.

00:01:50.520 You kind of have to like widen out your appeal.

00:01:53.200 And Nenshi keeps making his appeal more narrow over time.

00:01:57.040 But anyways, so we're going to be talking about the results from a new Leger poll today and

00:02:01.440 comparing it to the last results that they released a few months ago.

00:02:04.900 And then I also want to talk about the embarrassing effort to try and recall UCP MLAs.

00:02:11.860 I want to show you guys just how poor the results were in the riding of Calgary Bow, where the

00:02:17.980 NDP and the Alberta Teachers Association put all of their resources in order to get rid of

00:02:23.340 the education minister.

00:02:25.020 Demetrius Nicolaitis won a pretty thin plurality of the vote in the last Alberta election.

00:02:31.340 And so in theory, he should have been one of the easiest people to recall.

00:02:35.360 And they didn't even get close.

00:02:37.720 And this isn't a province like British Columbia, where you need 40% of registered voters to

00:02:42.600 sign.

00:02:43.280 You need like 18% and you get 60 days to do it.

00:02:46.680 And although there are some restrictions on how you can collect signatures, it shouldn't

00:02:50.740 be that difficult if people genuinely didn't like the minister.

00:02:54.980 In fact, Demetrius is pretty popular. 0.91

00:02:57.260 And so the NDP just ended up making themselves look like whiny scolds.

00:03:01.600 But we will be getting to that topic later on in this video.

00:03:04.160 So first, before we get into the numbers, I just want to remind you guys, if you like

00:03:08.200 the show, make sure to leave a like on this video, subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber,

00:03:13.240 leave a comment about what you think about all this.

00:03:15.800 And if you want to support the show financially, I encourage you to hit the join button below

00:03:19.780 the video and make a small monthly contribution.

00:03:22.760 It makes the channel more sustainable for me and makes me less reliant on the YouTube algorithm

00:03:27.220 and allows me to cover more niche topics like Alberta provincial polling rather than only

00:03:32.080 talk about national issues.

00:03:33.360 A lot of other channels basically only talk about national issues because it's perceived

00:03:37.500 as the topic areas that are going to get the most clicks.

00:03:41.000 But I, based on how I do things, I like to cover provincial stuff and even sometimes municipal

00:03:45.300 stuff, which naturally doesn't get as much attention.

00:03:48.700 But I'm not trying to, you know, pin an award to my chest.

00:03:51.640 But if I don't cover it, I don't think any other YouTuber will cover it.

00:03:54.760 But anyways, let's get into these numbers now.

00:03:57.440 So I want to, I'm just going to show you the results from the latest Leger poll, and then

00:04:01.540 I will basically like, you know, draw an up arrow or down arrow afterwards and show you

00:04:06.280 how much it's changed since the last time they did a poll.

00:04:09.340 Now, this Leger poll, and these are pretty realistic results.

00:04:13.740 I sometimes will caution people not to believe a poll if the results are too much of what

00:04:18.740 they would like to see, or they're just completely like anti whatever you think would be happening.

00:04:24.020 Like federally, if you see a poll that's like plus 14 liberal, I'm sorry, federal politics

00:04:28.700 is not an arena where you're going to see a plus 14 either way, at least not in our current

00:04:34.200 state. But in Alberta, this result actually seems realistic. Even if we take a few points

00:04:39.520 off what the UCP have, they are still winning a absolutely thumping majority. So in this latest

00:04:45.860 poll from Leger with around 823 people polled, which is a pretty good sample size for Alberta,

00:04:52.700 we have the UCP in this poll at 50%, winning effectively a majority of the vote, since I do

00:05:02.600 believe they have rounded this one down. Oh my goodness, my writing is so bad here,

00:05:07.240 because my easel is falling apart. This is annoying for me. So we have 50% for the UCP in this poll.

00:05:17.240 And of course, that is only a good result insofar as the NDP isn't close. And they are not close.

00:05:24.840 The NDP does not even crack into the 40s. The NDP is stuck at 37% in this new Leger poll.

00:05:36.040 And then they labeled them as the Alberta Party in this poll, but they've changed their name

00:05:41.240 recently to the Progressive Tory Party, which is led by two former UCP MLAs, Peter Guthrie and Scott

00:05:49.460 Sinclair. In this poll, despite it being fairly widely covered, what they were doing with the

00:05:55.100 Alberta Party and changing the name and trying to create a center-right alternative to the Conservatives,

00:06:01.220 to the UCP, the Progressive Tory Party in this poll only came in with 4% of the vote.

00:06:11.780 They could literally double their votes and steal them exclusively from Daniel Smith's UCP,

00:06:17.480 and Daniel Smith would still win another majority next election. And now I have these two categories

00:06:23.720 because there are actually a lot of parties that exist in Alberta right now, which also sort of says

00:06:29.720 something about BC politics. Whenever you see sort of whiny establishment BC conservatives saying,

00:06:35.260 why does one BC exist? You're splitting our vote. Daniel Smith's doing a good job. And so what you

00:06:41.860 actually have happening is there's no vote split. It's not because like everyone in Alberta is very

00:06:48.060 anti-vote splitting. That doesn't matter. It's because Daniel Smith and the UCP are doing a good

00:06:52.640 job. So there's nowhere that the vote is actually going to split. So LW here and RW is left-wing and

00:06:59.720 right-wing because there's so many parties. I'm just going to basically amalgamate all of the percentages

00:07:04.340 into these two categories. So when it comes to left-wing parties, that being the Green Party of

00:07:10.260 Alberta, the Liberal Party of Alberta, and I'll even take a couple of points from other and add that

00:07:15.240 together. Right now, there are about 5% of people voting for other left-wing parties in Alberta,

00:07:23.900 which really is a shame on the progressive Tories that they can't even beat all of the other

00:07:28.860 also ran parties in this poll. And then on the more right-wing side, I'll use a slightly darker

00:07:35.140 shade or I'll use a purple color. Now I'm trying to compare them to the PPC. But on the right wing

00:07:40.380 with parties like the Wild Rose Loyalty Coalition, the Republican Party of Alberta, and some of the

00:07:46.800 other voters, I would say that they are also here at around 5% as well. I'm basically splitting

00:07:54.920 other in half because Alberta is naturally a more right-wing province. Other in this poll had 3%,

00:08:01.680 so I gave 1% to the left-wing parties and 2% to the right-wing parties. The Republican Party of

00:08:08.360 Alberta is effectively no bother to Daniel Smith and the UCP, which again, it demonstrates that if a

00:08:15.320 party is doing a good job, they are not going to have their vote split. Daniel Smith is at no risk

00:08:22.200 from the other right-wing parties or the progressive Tories. She's at 50% regardless because she's done

00:08:29.080 a good job as premier. I used to not even really like Daniel Smith very much. I really didn't want

00:08:33.800 her winning the leadership of the UCP back in the day because she had done some silly progressive

00:08:38.200 things when she was Wild Rose leader and said some weird stuff about net zero policy and immigration.

00:08:44.500 But since then, I would at least say it wasn't like I was wrong. I think I was right about her.

00:08:49.480 And then she shifted her politics in a direction where I now like her. And so she's brought people

00:08:54.860 like me solidly on board with the UCP and I'm not going to leave. I was still going to vote UCP

00:08:59.520 anyways. I voted UCP in 2023. But if there was anyone who had more hesitation than me, who was

00:09:05.400 wanting to vote for a different right-wing party, or maybe if they're a little more center as a

00:09:10.020 conservative, they want to vote progressive Tory. She's done a lot of work to make sure that people 0.98

00:09:14.880 are going to stick with the UCP. And now I want to show you guys what the polls were like just a few

00:09:21.120 months ago with the UCP. So this last poll was done in October from Leger. So I want to show you

00:09:28.060 what the changes have been since then. So we'll just basically start with the, I guess, progressive

00:09:34.540 Tories. The Liberals have actually fallen by 4%. They actually were at 9% in the last Leger poll,

00:09:41.760 which probably demonstrates a lot of people shortly after the last federal election were

00:09:46.060 selecting Liberal and all the polls not realizing this is the provincial Liberals, which are barely

00:09:50.620 a real party. I really doubt anyone even recognizes the Liberal party leader. I don't even know what his

00:09:56.780 first name is. I just know that his last name is Roggeveen or whatever. So they used to be at 9%

00:10:01.340 and they've fallen for. The progressive Tories have rightfully gone up 2% since they weren't really much

00:10:07.980 of a thing back in October. And they've kind of become a little bit more of a thing, but not

00:10:12.320 really. I think right-wing parties are down, but they didn't actually pull that specifically last

00:10:16.800 time. And the conservative party, we're going to be getting to the NDP and the conservatives in just

00:10:22.760 a second. The NDP have actually fallen by 2%, which ain't good because they already weren't

00:10:31.580 polling that well compared to the conservatives' last poll. But the conservatives, since the last

00:10:37.720 Leger poll, have increased the most, or the biggest change has actually been in favor of Daniel Smith,

00:10:44.860 increasing by 6 points, going from 44% all the way to 60, or sorry, to 50. Again, even back in the last

00:10:54.980 poll, 44% to 39%, Daniel Smith probably still wins a majority in that poll. But overall, I think this

00:11:03.340 demonstrates that Nahid Nenshi and the NDP's whining over the past, like, few months has not been doing

00:11:10.300 good things for them. The NDP doesn't understand its voter base at all. Rachel Notley kind of did. She 0.99

00:11:16.820 understood that you need working class people to vote NDP if you're ever going to win an election.

00:11:21.680 But what we have with Nahid Nenshi is a man who is so progressive that he runs headfirst into every

00:11:29.640 single issue that is going to tick off Alberta parents, that's going to tick off working class 0.89

00:11:34.560 voters, that's going to make business people downtown Calgary mad. He is against coal mining in

00:11:40.140 the Rockies, which that's a great way of turning off trades workers and working class, you know, labor 1.00

00:11:44.820 people. He's gone after parental rights, which is a great way of pushing people over to the UCP.

00:11:50.680 And also, this recall effort that I'm going to be getting to in a second has just made the NDP

00:11:56.280 look extremely petty. Now, I know the NDP and the Alberta Teachers Association is not strictly

00:12:04.040 involved with the recall efforts because it must remain nonpartisan. The people going around

00:12:09.100 collecting signatures must be local to the riding. But everyone knows the sort of people who were

00:12:15.000 involved in this stuff and organizing it were the NDP. It was the ATA. It was Jason Schilling,

00:12:20.840 the president of the ATA, Nahid Nenshi. They weren't overtly involved, but it was clearly a

00:12:26.600 front for them because they basically triggered it because the Alberta teachers were not given a

00:12:31.100 generous enough increase in their pay and more like teachers in classrooms and teacher assistants.

00:12:37.600 Daniel Smith probably gave more than I would have offered to the Alberta Teachers Association,

00:12:41.960 and they tried to protest and shut down schools because they got like, what was it? I think they

00:12:47.820 were promised a 12% wage increase over three years or four years. That was deemed not good enough.

00:12:54.540 They were given 3,000 more teachers promised, 1,500 teachers assistants promised, and that was not

00:13:00.660 good enough for the ATA. So they attempted to recall pretty much every UCP MLA for some reason,

00:13:06.620 but they were mainly going after the education minister, Demetrius Nicolaitis, because apparently

00:13:12.120 he had lost the confidence of the voters of his riding. This is the way that they had to frame it

00:13:17.980 because it has to be a local reason to get rid of somebody. So apparently he lost confidence.

00:13:23.340 Totally had nothing to do with the ATA not getting not only the generous offer from Daniel Smith,

00:13:28.320 but $2 billion more in benefits. It was because Demetrius just hasn't been conserving his

00:13:34.460 constituents very well. So I need to pull up for you. I'm going to erase this, and then we're going

00:13:40.300 to come back, and I want to show you just how pathetic the recall effort was in Calgary-Bow.

00:13:46.880 Okay, now we're back. So in Alberta, in order to recall politicians, they recently changed the rules

00:13:53.760 from the absurdly high measure of needing 40% of all registered voters to sign the petition,

00:13:59.060 to needing, like it's some complex formula, but in Calgary-Bow, it translated to basically needing

00:14:04.840 the signatures of 60% of the number of people who ended up actually casting a ballot. Now you don't

00:14:10.980 have to find the people who cast ballots, but just that's the specific number, 60% of the number of

00:14:16.660 people who ended up casting ballots. And because there were 20, let's make sure to write this properly,

00:14:22.980 we had 26,486 people voted in Calgary-Bow. That meant they needed around 16,006 signatures in order

00:14:40.760 to recall Demetrius Nicolaitis in Calgary-Bow. Now, that doesn't seem like that tall of an order. Yeah,

00:14:48.440 maybe it's going to be difficult getting people to volunteer going door to door in the riding,

00:14:53.000 considering they must be from the riding, and you can't just bust in a bunch of activists.

00:14:57.000 But still, you have a team of like 12 people or so going out every day for 60 days, or even going

00:15:02.960 out every other day. Shouldn't be that difficult. I've gone campaigning before, and even when I need

00:15:07.760 to make people buy a membership for me running in the Calgary-Signal Hill nomination, which actually

00:15:13.700 does cover the Calgary-Bow area, even needing people to pay $15 for a membership,

00:15:18.280 and then sign up to get me on the ballot for the nomination. Although I was later kicked out,

00:15:23.060 but that's another story for another day. I was able to get a decent amount of people to sign up,

00:15:29.000 at least onto my contact sheets every day. And it's far more daunting to sign up to some random guy's

00:15:33.940 attempt to run for a nomination than it is to supposedly get rid of somebody that people don't

00:15:39.040 like. Now, people actually do like Demetrius. That's why this whole thing failed. But in theory,

00:15:43.020 it should have been easy if the narrative the NDP and the ATA had set out was actually true.

00:15:48.280 So they needed the 16,006 signatures in order to get this thing across the board. Do you know how

00:15:54.800 many they got? They got a grand total over 60 days of 6,519 signatures. That's not even half. That is

00:16:09.020 just a little bit over. That is approximately 40% of the signatures that they required. And this is

00:16:17.180 the guy. They thought, they absolutely, if they were going to recall one guy, it was going to be

00:16:22.260 Demetrius Nicolaitis. Now, I need to show you something even more embarrassing, is that in the last

00:16:28.200 election, Demetrius, and I don't think it's actually 60% of the registered voters you need to sign the

00:16:34.420 petition. I think it has something to do with what the person got who won in the last election,

00:16:40.100 plus a certain amount of votes. But his NDP opponent in this riding, Drew Farrell, in the last

00:16:46.600 election, ended up getting 12,552 votes, which was around 47% of that election.

00:16:58.420 That election. So they couldn't even get, they only got a little bit more than half

00:17:04.780 of what Drew Farrell got in the last election. They couldn't even hunt down the people who voted

00:17:10.200 NDP in the last election to sign it. Now, they still would have been short by a bit, because

00:17:14.820 obviously that would be insane that you can get the same amount of signatures as the person who lost

00:17:19.660 the election still recall them, or even the amount of people who voted for the guy. That would be way

00:17:24.460 too easy of a threshold. But the fact that they came in this low is absolutely pathetic. And now 0.99

00:17:32.140 there are recalls against people like Angela Pitt, and Danielle Smith herself, and pretty much every

00:17:38.020 Calgary area UCP MLA. And it's not going to work, guys. In fact, actually, in British Columbia,

00:17:44.780 there's a group of people, including conservative insiders, who want to try and recall Dallas Brody,

00:17:50.300 and they're going to require 40% registered voters to sign the thing, which is going to be like 28,000

00:17:57.340 signatures in order to get rid of her in 90 days or something like that. So they get a little bit

00:18:02.820 more time, but there's a lot more signatures. In a riding where it's like 54% Chinese Canadians,

00:18:08.800 and the stereotype that exists, which is it's stereotype for a reason is that Chinese voters don't like to

00:18:13.820 sign random things people stick in their faces. So they're pretty screwed. But yeah, this is why 0.99

00:18:19.900 Nahid Nenshi and the NDP are not very popular right now. This is why Danielle Smith and the

00:18:25.360 Conservatives are leading them by 13 points. It's because they offer nothing, they don't understand

00:18:31.100 the voting demographics they need to win, they reject working class people, and people who own 1.00

00:18:36.400 businesses and who work in finance for public sector union workers only. That's the only group of

00:18:42.860 people the NDP actually serves. They are high-pitched whiners about absolutely everything, 0.94

00:18:48.940 and all this recall stuff makes them look like sore losers from the last election. I was predicting this 0.98

00:18:55.000 when the recall started. This is going to turn voters against the NDP, because they look like

00:19:00.240 troublemakers, not actually people who are ready to govern. I don't even know, I think, and I'm not even

00:19:06.220 sure if Nahid Nenshi even makes it to the next election as NDP leader, because of just how poorly

00:19:11.880 he's been performing with all the initiatives he set out on. Danielle Smith keeps embarrassing the

00:19:16.260 guy, and she knows how to play her political cards right, regardless if you like the policies, 1.00

00:19:20.360 and I like the policies. She's really good at playing politics, and then she just assumes 1.00

00:19:26.000 that politics is just pleasing whatever activists are in his party, but that is not how it works

00:19:30.960 anywhere. Now, the base of your party really matters in an election, but you also do need to try and reach

00:19:36.820 normal people. Now, I always go after the Conservatives federally and in other provinces,

00:19:41.520 because sometimes they forget their base exists, but in Alberta, the NDP doesn't understand that

00:19:47.320 anyone outside of their base exists, and I mean not just support base, I mean membership base. The

00:19:53.660 NDP does things like, again, trying to ban coal mining in the Rockies, thinking that this is going

00:19:59.380 to be a big vote-getter. Yeah, you just lost Banff Kananaskis trying to do that. You're going to lose

00:20:05.320 a lot of Calgary finance guys who, in fact, don't want us to ruin the economy because a bunch of

00:20:10.020 greeny leftists told them to, but whatever. This is all hilarious to me. That's probably it for this

00:20:16.740 video, guys. I'm going to be back in the next day or two with another BC polling update, because we

00:20:21.340 do, in fact, have another poll out actually from Leger, like the one that did the previous poll we

00:20:26.420 just talked about today, and it had 1 BC at 6% of the vote, which is not bad at all, because that is

00:20:31.820 the first time Leger has even bothered polling 1 BC in its polls for the province of British

00:20:38.780 Columbia. Why am I stumbling all over myself? Well, it's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes,

00:20:43.660 guys. But anyways, with all that being said, thank you guys for watching. Like, share,

00:20:48.040 and subscribe, and I'll see you all later.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - February 04, 2026

Danielle Smith crushes Nenshi in Alberta polls - Recalls fail miserably!

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