The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - May 15, 2024


David Eby losing young BC voters - Conservatives have momentum

Topics
BC Conservatives winning young voters
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
David Eby Stephen Harper John Rustad Michael Ignatieff David Coletto
Justin Trudeau embarrassed by reporter asking if he will resign! BC Conservatives lead the NDP - Rustad rejects BCU begging for merger

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

190.06

Word count

1,867

Sentence count

93


Summary

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

A new online poll from Abacus has the BC Tories leading the BC NDP by 6 points. This is a massive turnaround for BC NDP Premier David Eby, who was leading by 18 points in November. In this episode, I break down why this is happening and why it could spell trouble for him.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 A new and very interesting poll is out for the British Columbia provincial election that demonstrates that B.C. NDP Premier David Eby is in a lot of trouble.
00:00:09.680 Because previously, all the polling that was showing the B.C. Conservatives catching up and even leading the B.C. NDP with decided voters were all IVR polls.
00:00:18.580 And supposedly, IVR polls are messy and sometimes they're very off with their results, although a lot of the pollsters doing them have very good records, so I kind of doubt that.
00:00:28.960 But everyone's been saying, well, wait until an online poll actually shows the same thing.
00:00:33.780 And now we, in fact, have that.
00:00:36.060 But first, before I dive into this Abacus data poll, I just want to go back to the one that Abacus did back in November.
00:00:42.760 They haven't polled this race since November, and Abacus tends to be pretty accurate with where people are at.
00:00:49.020 They are usually very, very accurate in federal and provincial elections being within just a few points of the real result.
00:00:55.180 And back in November, Abacus had this race with David Eby's NDP with 44%, and John Rustad's Conservatives having 26%, Falcons United at 17%, and Furstenot's Greens at 9%.
00:01:08.760 Now, jumping forward, David Coletto and Abacus have it with the BC NDP with 40%, the Conservatives 34%, United 13%, and BC Greens at 10%.
00:01:21.120 Now, this is a pretty massive jump, obviously, considering that, again, it was just in November, that it was an 18-point lead for the BC NDP.
00:01:31.060 And now that lead is down to just six points, with obviously all the momentum going in favor of the BC Conservatives.
00:01:38.740 This was also way back when the BC Conservatives did not have a lot of money on hand, and naturally now they are going to be getting way more donations in and being able to campaign way easier.
00:01:49.100 So they've made most of these gains with all of the sort of, you know, barriers coming against them.
00:01:55.600 They had money barriers, name recognition barriers, and they've smashed through most of those.
00:02:00.080 And now they're getting to the point where they can just easily pick up voters from being able to, one, be seen as a credible party who can beat David Eby, having enough money to actually be able to do a province-wide campaign.
00:02:12.700 And then the third thing is just all of the policy issues are going against David Eby.
00:02:18.160 But even more interestingly is when we go down to the demographics of who is voting for each party.
00:02:24.180 Now, this is the regionals. It demonstrates that, yes, as everyone knows, the BC Conservatives do really well in the interior and the north, and generally in metro Vancouver.
00:02:34.080 And then in Vancouver Island, the BC NDP tend to do better there, just as the Greens also do better.
00:02:39.080 None of this is a surprise, and this is kind of what people expect.
00:02:42.080 Vancouver and Vancouver Island are the NDP strongholds, and then all the rural suburban areas are where the Conservatives tend to do well.
00:02:50.280 And then when we go down further to the actual age demographics, you will see that the BC Conservatives are actually the young party right now.
00:02:59.460 They're winning both 18 to 29-year-olds as well as 30 to 44.
00:03:03.640 Now, the thing is this, what I find it's telling, and why I believe that this is demonstrating why David Eby is going to lose this next election,
00:03:12.220 is that this shows that on social media, the BC Conservatives are reaching a lot of young people and flipping them quite easily.
00:03:19.660 Those are demographics that usually you expect the BC NDP to be winning.
00:03:23.600 They tend to win progressive young people, but young people are going for the Conservatives.
00:03:27.380 And then older voters, since they watch more legacy media, you're less likely to be watching YouTube or being on Twitter or Facebook all the time if you're in that 60-plus demographic.
00:03:38.640 Although I know a lot of you in the demographic watch my show.
00:03:41.360 You are definitely the outliers.
00:03:42.720 But this is demonstrating that the people that the BC Conservatives can reach now on social media with not a lot of spending tend to like them.
00:03:51.580 And now as the provincial election heats up and the media start focusing on the race more and the BC Conservatives are able to get to more doors,
00:03:59.880 they're going to start flipping older voters.
00:04:02.180 So what they've basically done is proven that they can actually win the more difficult demographic to reach, which are the youth.
00:04:08.420 And so once they actually go into full-scale campaign mode, the BC Conservatives are going to start flipping a lot of older voters.
00:04:16.080 These are voters who crime, taxes, just the lack of jobs, drugs are the biggest thing for.
00:04:24.000 The youth are mostly affordability issues.
00:04:26.280 It mostly has to do with housing.
00:04:28.120 And the BC Conservatives are cleaning up on those issues that usually it's considered that the left has the advantage with the youth
00:04:33.820 because pushing things like rent control and rent subsidies is usually fairly appealing for the youth who don't know as much about the damage that rent control and subsidies do on a market.
00:04:44.080 So that's great.
00:04:45.260 And then when the BC Conservatives can reach older voters with their policies on drugs, crime, you know, SOGI 1, 2, 3, and whatnot,
00:04:53.260 that's when they're going to start winning those people as they get closer to the election.
00:04:57.540 And I want to peel through a little bit more of this poll, but really, obviously the NDP are still ahead.
00:05:04.760 The online polls tend to shift a little bit slower because the IVR polls are when you get a phone call and it's a robo-voice
00:05:10.920 and it tells you to select different numbers for different parties.
00:05:14.500 Those tend to reach the voters who are most engaged, which is why you have a lot of those polls leaning a little bit more BC Conservative.
00:05:22.640 And these online polls are showing the BC NDP ahead.
00:05:28.860 I don't know why I can't talk, but they're showing the BC NDP ahead because online polls tend to be a little bit more broad.
00:05:35.040 So yes, if the election was held to date, the NDP would win.
00:05:38.200 But even if just half of the swing occurred in this next poll, the BC Conservatives would be at least tied or ahead.
00:05:45.320 Because in this last poll in November, the BC NDP were ahead 18 points and it was effectively a 12-point swing between the Conservatives and the NDP.
00:05:56.220 The Conservatives gained eight points and the BC NDP lost four points, which is a 12-point swing.
00:06:02.320 If a six-point swing simply happened between the NDP and the Conservatives, they would be tied.
00:06:07.360 And that would tend to advantage the BC Conservatives, who are going to have a way easier time convincing their voters to go out and vote for real change, rather than the NDP, who are going to have to either fearmonger against their Conservative opponents to get their base out, or they're just going to have to make the pitch that maybe you should show up and keep us in power, like our policies will start working if you give us another four years.
00:06:31.500 But that's a losing narrative. Stephen Harper's Conservatives were leading into the 2015 election.
00:06:37.340 And I don't want to compare Harper to Eby. Obviously, Harper is a far better leader than Eby has ever been.
00:06:44.520 But Harper went into that election leading in the polls, but he ended up losing to the Liberals, who actually were never leading during that entire election, because the Conservatives' narrative was, vote us in because we're decently competent.
00:06:57.020 The BC NDP don't even have the narrative that they're competent.
00:06:59.980 They only have the narrative that you should come out and support and maintain the progressive dream that we're trying to create in BC here.
00:07:07.500 Come and vote for BC NDP utopia that has not arrived yet, but if we double all the spending on all these crazy programs, it will eventually arrive.
00:07:15.860 That is a terrible pitch, because you're not voting to do something big.
00:07:21.020 People like to show up to do something big, whether it's change the government or it's reject a radical opposition.
00:07:27.040 That's what happened in 2011. You had very opportunistic Liberal Party politicians like Michael Ignatieff trying to take the prime ministership away from Stephen Harper, and they were very uninspiring figures.
00:07:38.320 And so voters basically showed up to reject them.
00:07:41.240 Nobody dislikes the BC Conservatives.
00:07:43.680 Yes, John Rostead doesn't have a very high approval rating, but that's just because people don't really know who he is still,
00:07:48.420 just demonstrating the fact that the BC Conservatives have only recently started to gain enough money to be able to openly market themselves more widely.
00:07:56.840 So what the BC NDP are either going to have to do is fearmonger against the Conservatives to drive people out, but people aren't scared of the BC Conservatives' agenda.
00:08:04.480 It's all about reversing terrible things the NDP are doing.
00:08:07.460 That's something that actually appeals to people.
00:08:09.100 And asking people just to come out to simply maintain EB's government because we're doing good things doesn't work when other polls show that like 78% of people on a lot of the major issues of this election think the current government is doing a poor job on drugs, SOGI, on taxes, affordability issues in general, housing.
00:08:28.440 They're way in the negatives.
00:08:30.040 So the idea that they're going to somehow get out their base is ridiculous.
00:08:33.540 I don't even think the BC Conservatives have to be leading in the polls to win this election.
00:08:37.220 They simply need to be close and then drive their people out in the ridings that matter.
00:08:41.360 They'll win the rural areas.
00:08:42.560 They just need the donut around Vancouver proper, and then they need to be able to win some of the more northern Vancouver and southern Vancouver Island seats away from Victoria.
00:08:53.800 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:08:56.660 If you live in BC, make sure you donate to the BC Conservatives.
00:09:00.780 They need a marketing budget.
00:09:01.940 They need to make sure that every voter in that province knows it's a fight between the crazy NDP and the Conservatives.
00:09:08.460 The United are completely irrelevant.
00:09:11.160 All they have is consulting donor money to make themselves seem bigger than they really are.
00:09:15.660 I could see that party being sub-8% by the time the election rolls around.
00:09:20.340 So make sure, donate to your local BC Conservative EDA, and I will put a link in the description below for the BC Conservatives' donation page.
00:09:28.680 Make sure you donate, make sure that they have the funding to be able to fight the NDP, because if you don't donate, don't expect other people to donate.
00:09:36.200 Anyways, and then also, if you don't live in BC, you can donate to my legal fund, but, you know, I pitched that enough.
00:09:42.480 I almost get tired of explaining the legal case.
00:09:44.480 But if you want to donate to the show, you can through the Give, Send, Go link in the description.
00:09:48.160 See you guys later.