A new poll in British Columbia shows the Conservatives catching up to the NDP in the polls and closing the gap. The problem for the NDP is that their support is coming from a narrow group of voters, mostly white voters. The Tories have a much broader base of voters who are more diverse and more likely to vote for them.
00:00:00.440Polling in British Columbia is showing that Premier David Eby and his NDP party are in real trouble with BC voters ahead of the next provincial election this fall.
00:00:10.280The problem is not just that the Conservatives have a lot of momentum, and in polls like this one from ResearchCo,
00:00:16.220they are catching up with the NDP as the NDP contracts in their support over the past few quarters.
00:00:22.100But also there's other polls out there showing that the BC Conservatives are effectively tied with the NDP,
00:00:27.520considering many of these polls have about a 3% to 3.5% margin of error.
00:00:32.360The Conservatives' 32% compared to the NDP's 34% is effectively a statistical tie, and there's still 13% of voters that are undecided.
00:00:41.460And in past Main Street polls, when they've released their decided voter numbers, it's actually leaning quite heavily towards the Conservatives.
00:00:47.760This is the last poll they did of decided voters that showed that 40% of decided voters are going to vote for the Conservatives,
00:00:53.520with only 34% of people saying that they're going to be voting NDP who are decided.
00:00:59.100But there's a deeper problem that the NDP have.
00:01:02.140It's that they have a very narrow band of voters that they actually appeal to.
00:01:06.200It's voters who live in downtown Vancouver and who live in Victoria, mostly white voters,
00:01:11.320where the Conservatives have a far broader demographic of people who will actually show up and vote for them.
00:01:16.680So check out these deep statistics from the recent Main Street poll of the different demographic groups' support.
00:01:23.240So with white voters, the BC NDP have 34.3% compared to the Conservatives' 30.9%.
00:01:29.840Black voters, the Conservatives are winning them 38.5% to the NDP's 21.7%.
00:01:35.500East Asian, the NDP has 34.6% and the Conservatives have 37.4%.
00:01:40.680Latino voters are going 51.8% towards the Conservatives and only 29.7% towards the NDP.
00:01:48.300Middle East voters are undecided at 40%, so I think that's a demographic nobody can really tag yet on who they're going to end up supporting.
00:01:56.060South Asian voters are only going 11.7% towards the NDP, with 50.1% of them going towards the Conservatives.
00:02:04.660Southeast Asian, the NDP are winning at 41.7% to the Conservatives' 29.8%.
00:02:09.500First Nations, the NDP are also winning at 54.2% to the Conservatives' 21.4%.
00:02:15.360The problem with actually leading with First Nations voters, though, is that there's only 200,000 First Nations in British Columbia,
00:02:22.160and most of them are in rural areas where there's a lot more Conservative voters of different groups who tend to outweigh them.
00:02:30.080I'm not trying to break everything down by ethnic group and saying, oh, there's an Indian guy over there, he must be voting Conservative,
00:02:35.660or there's a First Nation guy, he must be voting NDP.
00:02:37.440Obviously, everyone's an individual, but this gives you a good snapshot of where the different parties are at.
00:02:42.460The Conservatives are doing really well with groups who live in the suburban areas and the rural areas.
00:02:48.980The problem for the NDP is that they are only appealing to very over-educated white voters in downtown centers.
00:02:56.140That is where the vast majority of the muscle from their vote is coming from.
00:03:00.180It's white voters in downtown Vancouver and Victoria and some Southeast Asian voters, but overall, it's mostly white voters.
00:03:08.520That's kind of the funny thing whenever the NDP goes after the Conservatives as this old white man party.
00:03:14.540It's like, actually, it's the more diverse party when you look at it, especially among South Asian voters.
00:03:18.980There are tons of South Asian people in British Columbia, and they are a big voting demographic.
00:03:24.840They are big into small business, and so they cannot stand the drug decriminalization and anti-small business policies of David Evey's government.
00:03:34.600When I say anti-small business, I mean high taxes and doing nothing about the rampant rate of crime around the major cities.
00:03:41.360This is a big issue for those voters, and they're not going to be swayed back over to the NDP.
00:03:46.680The problem for the NDP is like this past Main Street poll of decided voters shows, it shows that people who are voting conservative are pretty sure about it.
00:03:55.700People voting NDP, because when you look at this recent poll, this is a lot like the last Main Street poll of all voters.
00:04:01.680When you actually look at all voters, about a third or a quarter of the NDP's vote is not very sure at all if they're actually going to be voting for the NDP.
00:04:11.820And this also showed they were still 13% up for grabs.
00:04:15.040And if the undecided voters start splitting the way the decided voters do, that gives a massive advantage to the Conservatives.
00:04:21.660And many of the working class white voters and voters from different demographic groups who live in the suburbs are very much up for grabs for the Conservatives.
00:04:30.760Where who's going to be swayed from the Conservatives to the NDP?
00:04:34.740If you're voting Conservative and not NDP, it's for very strong reasons.
00:04:38.620Where if you're voting NDP instead of Conservative, you're almost only doing it to fend off the Conservatives, not because you think they're going to do anything bad.
00:04:45.540They're going to get rid of all the policies that 78% of British Columbians think have been failing.
00:04:50.720Past polls that I've looked at show that on the vast majority of issues, I think there wasn't even a single issue they were above water on.
00:04:57.220But the NDP has anywhere from 56% on the less hot-blooded issues up to 78% to 80% of people thinking they're doing a poor job.
00:05:08.520It's really hard to bring people back when they think that you're an utter incompetent fool.
00:05:12.840Justin Trudeau is demonstrating that that doesn't work on a federal level.
00:05:16.920That if people have thought that you've really ruined their lives at some point, that they aren't able to live normally because of your terrible policies,
00:05:23.880it's hard to make an announcement about some reform you're going to make or a new program you're going to release and have those voters say,
00:05:30.800you know what, let's give them a second chance.
00:05:34.340People get very easily turned off by radical policies.
00:05:37.740People want normal and they want the radical hippie David Eby out of office.
00:05:42.380The man is out of touch with British Columbia residents.
00:05:45.460And not only are the polling momentum shifting towards conservatives, but the turnout momentum is going to be great for the conservatives.
00:05:53.580As they door knock more, as they identify their voters, it's going to be way easier convincing a conservative voter to go out to vote for real change,
00:06:02.440rather than NDP voters voting for the status quo, which is not particularly inspiring.
00:06:07.840This is actually why Stephen Harper lost re-election in 2015, even though he was obviously more qualified than Justin Trudeau or like the NDP leader.
00:06:22.300Even though Stephen Harper was far more qualified than those two, he was running a campaign that wasn't actually promising anything big.
00:06:30.520And promising something big doesn't mean spending, but it's saying that we're going to do this kind of revolutionary thing in the sense that if he was in office in 2015 running for re-election,
00:06:40.240saying we're going to do deep tax reform after this election, we're going to cut personal taxes by 2% per year for the next four years to make us the most competitive economy in the country.
00:06:50.780That's something that makes people think about actually going out and voting.
00:06:53.820The problem in 2015 is the conservative vote stayed home and the liberal vote came out.
00:06:58.680So even though the polling showed it was kind of a three-way split between the NDP, conservatives, and the liberals, the only party with motivated voters was the liberals.
00:07:06.940And I see that happening in British Columbia again.
00:07:13.400But conservative voters will show up, especially from communities who are invested in the trades and small business and resource sectors, which the NDP has been taking a hammer to.
00:07:23.740There's nobody that's been taking a hammer to the things that the progressives love.
00:07:27.680These people feel like they've won over the past two elections, and they're unlikely to actually show up.
00:07:33.240But at the same time, the BC conservatives still need your help.
00:08:10.420If your family's voting NDP, you've got to shame them for basically saying that people should keep deteriorating on the streets based on, like, in this decriminalization environment that the NDP have created.
00:08:38.660We're being sued by a billionaire developer for no reason.
00:08:41.700He hasn't even submitted any evidence on how we defamed him, supposedly, in more than two and a half years of this case going on.
00:08:47.760Any donations really helped take the burden of cost off myself.
00:08:50.840And then also, if you happen to live in the federal riding of Calgary Signal Hill on the west side of Calgary, I am running to be your next federal conservative party nominee.
00:09:00.060So if you're a conservative member in that riding, mark me number one on your ballot so that we can make sure we have real conservatives representing these strong conservative ridings.
00:09:07.680And I don't want to forget, I always say also mark Michael Kim as a good number two.
00:09:11.720It is a ranked ballot, and I would never want to tell you to just vote for whoever else you want.
00:09:16.000Vote for the next best conservative guy.
00:09:17.720The second most conservative person in the race would be Michael Kim, and as time goes on, I'll try and determine who else would be the most conservative option.