The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 13, 2025


Don’t believe BAD polls - Liberals lead is small


Episode Stats

Length

18 minutes

Words per Minute

165.33154

Word Count

3,027

Sentence Count

189

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

In this video, I explain why you should trust the polls and why you shouldn't. I cover three pollsters, Abacus Data, Liaison, and Nanos, who have released polls this week, and explain why they are not to be trusted.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. I have the whiteboard out again for a video and I seem to be doing this
00:00:07.480 whenever something really interests me or something has gotten under my skin. And this is a video where
00:00:14.060 something has gotten under my skin. People on social media are way too credulous when it comes
00:00:20.620 to national polls and I want to go over some general principles on whether or not you should
00:00:26.440 believe a poll. I'm not saying that only polls where you like the results are real. I am saying
00:00:32.380 take the polls where the results make sense with how public opinion shifts and based on previous
00:00:39.140 election results or how polls used to be in different situations that were worse or better
00:00:46.120 than the one we are currently in. And so I want to talk to you guys about three different pollsters,
00:00:52.220 two of which I think are generally trustworthy and one of which, at least right now, I would not
00:00:58.920 trust. It's kind of a sliding scale of one I really like, one that's pretty good, and one that you
00:01:04.800 should not trust right now. But before I get into it, I just want to remind you, if you like the show,
00:01:10.220 make sure to leave a like on this video, subscribe if you are not yet a subscriber, and leave a comment
00:01:15.880 on what you think about this whole topic and situation. Again, most pollsters are trying to
00:01:22.440 get it right. I've said this in other videos, there are very few pollsters where they're just
00:01:26.360 making up numbers or doing an intentionally bad job in order to make their political side look good.
00:01:32.460 A situation where that has happened is recently, I believe, the Alberta Federation of Labour commissioned
00:01:38.040 a pollster to do a poll, and it showed the NDP, surprisingly, is above the UCP by four points.
00:01:44.620 The problem is, at the same time that poll came out, you had some of the most accurate pollsters in
00:01:50.820 Canada, like Janet Brown doing polls of Alberta, which found that the UCP was leading the NDP from
00:01:56.760 anywhere from eight points to 14 points. So no, that was just a bad poll, and probably an intentionally
00:02:05.000 bad poll. The Alberta Federation of Labour wanted what it wanted, and that poll gave it to them. They
00:02:10.680 probably did a real poll, but they just did a poll based on some fantasy scenario where, you know,
00:02:16.540 60% of people who head out to the polls are public sector employees, which is not an actual normal
00:02:22.360 turnout. That's just me assuming what they did, but now let's get into the three pollsters I want to
00:02:28.720 talk about today. I'm just going to add their names to the board, and then I will go over what their
00:02:32.820 national results have been. Okay, these are the three pollsters I want to talk about who have all
00:02:39.440 released polls this week. Abacus Data, Liaison, and Nanos. So the two pollsters I do like on this chart
00:02:48.740 are Abacus Data and Liaison. I don't even quite agree with the polling result that Liaison came to,
00:02:54.620 and I know there's no agreeing or disagreeing with their result. I mean more so they probably
00:02:59.180 should have been, you know, they probably should have done a couple of samples over again, but it's
00:03:03.780 not unrealistic. We're going to get down to Nanos later, and the poll result is just unbelievable,
00:03:11.780 and then I'm going to explain why in greater detail in a second. But let's start off at the top here
00:03:17.380 with what Abacus had. I'll be going over Liberal, Conservative, and NDP. So Abacus had, like we showed
00:03:25.240 in another video, 43 Liberal. It had 40% Conservative, and then it had 8% NDP. I would actually say this one
00:03:39.280 may even have the Liberals a little too low compared to the Conservatives. You know, I could see the
00:03:44.880 Liberals being at 43 or 44, or the Conservatives being at 39 or 38. I would say a 3% lead for the
00:03:52.940 Liberals right now during their honeymoon maybe is a little bit of a small lead. Maybe it's more like
00:03:58.720 a 4 or 5% lead. But I still think it's a good pollster. Their numbers tend to move slow. They
00:04:04.920 don't have wild swings in what they find after certain events, because most people don't change
00:04:10.640 their votes that fast. It takes like a cataclysmic event for people to really change how they're
00:04:16.160 going to vote. But now let's move on to Liaison. Liaison here has the Liberals at 44%. And then
00:04:26.260 Liaison has the Conservatives at 35%. I'm going to get over to why I think they have the Conservatives a
00:04:34.200 little too low a bit later. But then we have the NDP at 11. Maybe a bit of a high poll for the NDP
00:04:42.640 considering they only scored about 6.6% in the federal election. That's almost double what they
00:04:49.000 had gotten. So it's a bit of an overpoll for the NDP, a little bit of an underpoll for the CPC. But
00:04:54.200 I think 44% is very realistic for the Liberals right now. But now let's get over to Nanos.
00:05:01.720 They have the Liberals at 45%, which is not exactly too high in my opinion for the Liberals. The problem
00:05:10.960 is that they have the Conservatives at 32% and then the NDP at 12. The NDP, who are famously broke right
00:05:23.340 now, are somehow double what they were at in the 2025 federal election. And the Liberals, if you can
00:05:31.500 count, are leading by 13%. They're leading here in this poll with Liaison by 9% and they're leading
00:05:41.440 with Abacus by 3%. Now, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle between Abacus and Liaison.
00:05:47.660 And if you're ever analyzing polls for yourself, I would say find a few pollsters that you think are
00:05:53.380 good. Kolsovsky is a good pollster. I think Innovation is good. Liaison is good. Abacus is
00:05:59.240 good. Main Street can be quite good as well. Find a few of them and then kind of track the differences.
00:06:05.540 Find one that's the high watermark. Find one that's the low watermark. And it's probably
00:06:09.900 somewhere in between the two. I did this frequently during the federal election when telling you guys
00:06:15.660 where I thought things were. Some people still say, well, why? You said Polyoff was going to win.
00:06:20.000 I literally never said that. I always said it's a coin toss on who's going to win the minority
00:06:24.240 government. And I would tell people to not believe pollsters that were showing Liberal leads of 5,
00:06:29.480 6, 7, 8, 9%. Because if the Liberals were leading by that much, they would have a big majority right
00:06:36.100 now. And they don't. They only won the popular vote by like 2.2%. And that still only resulted in them
00:06:43.380 getting a minority government. Because in fact, the Conservative Party's voter efficiency
00:06:47.860 has gone up substantially. Before, it was for every, let's say, 100,000 votes, the Conservatives
00:06:55.140 would win a certain amount of seats. Like for every 100,000 votes, the Conservatives received an
00:07:00.360 election, they would be winning about three or four seats. But if the Liberals got 100,000 votes,
00:07:05.840 they're winning like five seats or so. So the Liberals didn't have to get as many votes on average
00:07:10.900 for their wins, where the Conservatives had to get a lot more. It's actually reversed right now,
00:07:15.480 where the Conservatives actually don't need as many votes per win that they get, because they are
00:07:19.940 concentrating their votes in the areas that they need to. But anyways, now I want to move on to
00:07:26.000 specifically Liaison's Atlantic sample. And then I want to move on to some crazy news about Nanos.
00:07:32.760 Because when you hear the kind of seat results that this Nanos poll would result in, you will get
00:07:39.600 what I mean when I say that certain polls should be put on the shelf of shame and ignored. It's not a
00:07:44.880 good poll if it is telling you something that does not even feel like it is from the reality that we
00:07:50.320 live in. But just give me a second to clean up the board, and we'll talk a little bit about Liaison.
00:07:56.140 Okay, so we are back with Liaison, and I want to show you some of the regional numbers,
00:08:01.580 so I can explain why I think the Liaison polls plus nine for the Liberals is not quite realistic.
00:08:09.580 Again, Abacus's plus three is probably a little too low. This one is probably a little bit too high.
00:08:15.940 Now, they have right now, in Ontario, the Liberals leading the Conservatives 47% to the Conservatives 36%.
00:08:27.140 Now, I don't think this is probably too off of reality. It's a nine-point lead in Ontario. If the
00:08:33.380 Liberals are doing well, they are naturally going to have a lot of the vote that they're doing best in
00:08:38.600 be in the province of Ontario. British Columbia tends to be a little bit closer, and that's what
00:08:43.600 Nano says. I could see the Conservatives a little bit higher than 36% here, and the Liberals may be
00:08:48.960 more like a 45%. Conservatives more like a 37%, 38%. But no doubt, in a honeymoon period, this isn't
00:08:55.320 too crazy to see on a regional sample, especially because regional samples are going to be smaller
00:09:00.740 naturally than the full national sample. Now, in BC, I think this result is very realistic,
00:09:07.060 very much a Conservative estimate on where the parties are at right now. We have 42% for
00:09:13.340 the Liberals, and we have 37% for the Conservatives. And I would even say that Ontario number, that
00:09:20.240 puts the Conservatives within punching distance of the Liberals. This would still make them
00:09:24.740 competitive. And then I threw Alberta on the list, because Alberta is usually a good ballpark
00:09:31.060 province to be using. This poll has the Conservatives leading in Alberta 59% to the Liberals' 27%.
00:09:44.060 Now, this is probably an over-poll of the Liberals. I believe they only end up getting like 23%,
00:09:49.300 and the same poll has the NDP only at 8% in Alberta, despite the fact that the NDP has a seat in Edmonton,
00:09:56.600 and the Liberals only have, I believe, two seats, one in Edmonton and one in Calgary. So this is
00:10:02.560 probably too much of the vote going towards the Liberals. And frankly, getting the Conservatives
00:10:07.520 under 60% in Alberta is quite difficult. Not too bad, though. But the Atlantic Canada polls is where
00:10:15.760 I start to basically be a little bit incredulous regarding the results. They put this collection
00:10:24.120 of provinces at 55% Liberal to 25% Conservative. Now, the problem with this is that if you were
00:10:33.840 watching the federal election and you were following the polls, especially in Atlantic Canada, you constantly
00:10:39.600 saw polls where it was saying 55-25, 60-20, or 60-22, or something like that. Ridiculously large leads
00:10:47.840 for the Liberals, where some were predicting the Liberals were going to win every single seat in Atlantic
00:10:53.320 Canada. And I believe the Liberals ended up basically at even. They didn't win any more seats. The seats
00:10:59.700 kind of shuffled around a bit. We ended up having blue found land, where most of Newfoundland became blue
00:11:06.600 in the middle. So the Conservatives actually gained in Newfoundland, but then they ended up losing seats
00:11:11.840 in Nova Scotia, and then they held on to what they had in New Brunswick. But again, with all those
00:11:17.780 people predicting the 60-20, you know, 65-20, 55-20 kind of results in Atlantic Canada that were going
00:11:26.020 to show a Liberal sweep, it didn't end up manifesting on Election Day. You will see on this chart, I'm just
00:11:31.500 showing on screen because it's easier, the Conservatives were able to get 40% New Brunswick,
00:11:36.020 35% in Nova Scotia. In PEI, they got 36%. Newfoundland, they got 39.7%. And for some reason,
00:11:43.580 had the Yukon highlighted there, but that doesn't matter. But in general, the Conservatives were in
00:11:48.560 the mid-30s, not mid-20s. And I don't think that has changed since Election Day. So when I see a plus
00:11:55.440 nine for liaison, mentally, when I see that their Atlantic result is like this, I naturally say,
00:12:02.500 probably more like, even if the Conservatives slip down a bit, put them at 31% overall. 31 to maybe
00:12:10.320 like, you know, a 52 seems more realistic. Again, you'll look at the Liberal numbers here.
00:12:16.680 In New Brunswick, Liberals, 53. Nova Scotia, 57. PEI, 57. Newfoundland, 54. Also in case, in part because
00:12:25.300 the Greens no longer are competitive in Atlantic Canada, which they used to have a seat in,
00:12:28.900 and the NDP are not competitive at all these days. So 52-31 feels like we actually are in a
00:12:36.240 realistic area. Maybe you could put the Liberals up to where they got last time at 57. But 25 is a
00:12:42.900 massive under-poll considering the results that we saw in 25, despite all the polls saying it was going
00:12:48.240 to be a Liberal wipeout. And the best Conservatives could do is just hope they don't lose everything
00:12:53.060 they had. But now, let's jump over to Nanos' regionals so that I can prove to you why certain
00:13:00.400 pollsters should not be trusted. And again, it's not because they're rigged, it's because I don't
00:13:04.940 think they're doing a good enough job to make sure that they're getting people from all over
00:13:08.940 the regions of the provinces that they're polling. If you poll Toronto, and that's your Ontario sample,
00:13:14.920 it's going to make all of Ontario look a lot like Toronto. And that's subtle foreshadowing
00:13:20.000 for what we're about to look at. Okay, now I have Nanos on the board, and I regret to inform you,
00:13:27.280 I've tricked you. I have regionals here right now for Ontario, BC, Alberta, and Atlantic Canada,
00:13:34.560 like with the liaison poll. But all this doesn't matter, because Nanos didn't release any regionals.
00:13:41.060 All we know is that the Liberals are leading by 13 points. That seems realistic.
00:13:51.380 And now I need to show you something I threw in my bookmarks here that shows right now the Liberals
00:13:59.260 are slated to win. Drumroll, please, while I actually get this on screen. According to the actual,
00:14:06.640 like the formula that Polling Canada uses to project the results of elections, they say that
00:14:13.320 on the latest Nanos poll, the Liberals would win 95% of seats in Ontario. So we don't actually know
00:14:21.780 what the Ontario regionals are for Nanos. But what we do know, based on the polling projections
00:14:28.160 or seats from Polling Canada, that they would win 95% of the seats in Ontario. Ontario seats would go 95% them.
00:14:43.120 That doesn't look, this, you can call me crazy, I don't consider it realistic for the Liberals to be
00:14:50.580 getting 95% of the seats in Ontario. Look, I need to show you what Sherea Teest has, because he was the
00:15:00.040 most accurate poll, seat projectionist in the last election. And he, when he projects this one, it's
00:15:06.920 absolutely ridiculous as well. I'll bring this up on screen for you guys. And it says,
00:15:12.820 according to Sherea Teest, who's actually only 17 years old, but again, he's just very good at
00:15:21.200 projecting elections. He has the Liberals winning, on his very good quality polling projection website,
00:15:28.700 224 seats compared to the Conservative 79. So we would be going 224 to just 79.
00:15:40.580 Now, do you remember how many seats the Conservatives won in the last federal election? Well, let's look it
00:15:50.480 up to see how much of a fall this would be. So, out of all of, out of the 20, in the 2025 election,
00:16:02.520 the Conservatives got, were able to get 41.31% of the vote compared to the Conservative Liberals,
00:16:08.120 43.7%, but they won 144 seats. The Liberals won 169. And apparently, since election day,
00:16:18.400 with the Liberals, with a very mediocre performance so far, would win, what is this, 31,
00:16:26.040 55 extra seats. So they would go up 55, and the Conservatives would almost not even win half of
00:16:35.200 what they had won before. I believe this is basically just a little bit over that. It's like,
00:16:40.640 I think, two seats over 77. If you doubled that, it'd be like 144. Yeah, I'm not great at math. But
00:16:46.640 they would lose this. No, this is not how polls work. 21, that would be like 65 seats or whatever
00:16:55.380 that they've lost. This is what I say when a poll comes out, and I don't believe it. This is what I
00:17:01.700 mean when I say that Nanos goes on the shelf of shame. In the last three months, a very mediocre
00:17:06.880 performance by Mark Carney and his Liberal government. Do you think this is how things
00:17:10.860 would go? I'm not saying the Liberals wouldn't be leading. They are probably somewhere between
00:17:15.140 Liaison and Abacus. They ain't leading by 13%, and they ain't taking 95% of the seats in Ontario.
00:17:21.800 What have they done that are going to make people rally around them harder after they failed to get a
00:17:26.100 trade deal done, backed off from the digital services tax, which was good for them to back
00:17:30.560 off on, but they look stupid trying to implement it in the middle of a trade negotiation. They're
00:17:34.920 backing off of actually being serious about building pipelines, it seems. They are not actually doing
00:17:39.440 anything to crack down on crime. They're on an extended vacation. They do not have a spring budget
00:17:43.920 put out, even though Parliament voted to get them to do that. They're putting one out in the fall.
00:17:48.260 They have a $92 billion plus deficit. They are not winning 95% of the seats in Ontario.
00:17:55.080 After a bunch of the guys in finance just found out that Carney doesn't actually have a plan.
00:18:00.400 But anyways, that should be it for this video guys. Hopefully you didn't mind this slight rant
00:18:06.320 I went on, but make sure if you did like it to like the video, subscribe to the channel, leave a comment, and
00:18:12.960 stay tuned for me to bring out the whiteboard and complain about something some other day. See you guys later.