The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - April 12, 2025


Election simulation show clear path to Conservatives beating Liberals!


Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

176.79756

Word count

3,785

Sentence count

206

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about why I think the Conservatives have a better chance of winning the election than I initially thought. I explain why, and how the data points to a potential Conservative majority in the upcoming election. I also talk about how the Conservative vote is becoming increasingly concentrated in key areas of the country that the party needs to win.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. I have some very interesting information to share with you guys
00:00:06.060 today that actually makes me far more hopeful that the Conservatives can win this federal
00:00:11.220 election. Previously, I knew there was a path to victory for the Conservatives, but I assumed it
00:00:17.000 was far more narrow than I do today. There's a general theory in Canadian politics that's
00:00:22.420 generally true, that if the Conservatives want to beat the Liberals, they usually have to win
00:00:27.780 the popular vote by two to three points to at least get a minority government, and to win a
00:00:33.220 majority, they have to win by five, six, or even seven points because of the differences in efficiency
00:00:39.140 between the Conservative vote and the Liberal vote. It's not unfair, it's just that when you're the
00:00:44.840 Conservatives and you win massive landslide victories in ridings like Battle River Crowfoot,
00:00:50.680 obviously that doesn't really mean anything in areas in the GTA or in southwestern Ontario. You
00:00:57.280 have to win a riding to win a riding, and the Liberals have always been better at winning very
00:01:02.520 marginal victories in the GTA where they're picking up ridings with 35-37% of the vote, whereas the
00:01:09.600 average Conservative riding is one with like 52% of the vote, which means that when they win the
00:01:14.980 popular vote, it might actually mean they're just doing extremely well in Alberta and Saskatchewan
00:01:20.380 and elsewhere they're underperforming. But the 338 Canada simulator basically suggests that in this
00:01:27.400 election, it may be the Conservative Party with the far more efficient vote compared to the Liberals.
00:01:33.620 The Liberals may be just running up the score in downtown Toronto and Montreal and in certain areas
00:01:39.680 of Vancouver and Victoria, but overall, they're actually having a lot of their vote recede in key
00:01:47.040 ridings that they need in the GTA, southwestern Ontario, Manitoba, Calgary, Vancouver, the mainland
00:01:54.260 area outside of downtown Vancouver. Their vote, in effect, is actually becoming more concentrated
00:01:59.480 in areas that they were already going to win. So I want to take you guys through the simulator.
00:02:05.600 It's extremely interesting information, but before I get into it, guys, just a reminder to like this
00:02:11.400 video if you've been enjoying my federal election coverage. Subscribe to the channel if you've been
00:02:17.040 videos and you're not yet a subscriber and you want me to pop up in your feed more often and leave a
00:02:21.580 comment about what you think. I will be putting a link to the 338 simulator pinned at the top of the
00:02:28.500 comments so you guys can play around with the numbers. Tell me what you think the most likely outcome is
00:02:33.300 going to be from your perspective. But now, let's get into it. So this thing is basically only allowing you to
00:02:41.820 slide the scales for each of the party votes based on what the general projections of 338 say the
00:02:48.820 realistic range is. Now, I think it is still overestimating the Liberals because remember that
00:02:56.280 right now, the 338 projections are including pollsters like ECOS Research that has the Liberals
00:03:03.280 16 points ahead and I think there's that new one MQD or whatever out of Quebec that has them also
00:03:10.240 similarly 13 points ahead. Guys, this is not a plus 13 election for any party. The Liberals or the
00:03:18.700 Conservatives, if I see them more than eight points leading in a poll or even five points, frankly,
00:03:24.580 I'm like, I discount that pollster because this is a knife fight election. This is not an election
00:03:30.220 where someone's going to somehow win by 10 to 15 points unless someone just pulls their pants down
00:03:35.480 and falls on their face on the debate stage. Although with Mark Carney, maybe that's not too
00:03:40.460 much of a, you know, that's not a small chance of happening considering how bad of a debater he is.
00:03:45.340 So right now, this is just the default settings for the simulator. This is just based on what 338
00:03:51.580 thinks is going to happen based on all the polls aggregated together. So they have the Liberals at 43.7%,
00:03:58.000 Conservatives at 37.5, NDP at 8.6, Greens at 2, Block at 5.8, and PPC at 1.5. They have an asterisk next to
00:04:09.080 the total vote share because they note that all of the major parties, basically everything outside of
00:04:14.980 parties that are only putting up 30 candidates or independents, all their vote in the 2021 election
00:04:21.000 added up to 99.1% of the vote, the rest of it being independents or even smaller parties.
00:04:28.000 I, right off the bat, I'm just going to say I suspect that this election, all the other independents 0.88
00:04:35.160 and all the other sort of small-time parties are not going to get more than maybe 0.4 or 0.5% of the vote.
00:04:43.040 This is a very divided election where it is clearly a horse race between the Liberals and the Conservatives
00:04:48.700 in the vast majority of the country. And unlike Aaron O'Toole, Pierre Paulyov hasn't really done
00:04:53.960 anything to tick off Conservatives. So right now, based on the default settings, they're projecting
00:05:00.160 a Liberal majority of 196 to 121 for the Conservatives. So obviously that is a Liberal
00:05:07.740 majority, 197 to 121. They're showing the NDP just keeping eight of their seats, the Greens getting
00:05:13.580 one, and the Block, Quebec, Hawaii getting 16. The PPC gets zero because the PPC always gets zero.
00:05:20.540 It annoys me, and maybe I'm just going to sidetrack here before I start adjusting with the meters here
00:05:26.400 into what I think is a realistic election. I keep seeing PPC guys whine that they are not going to
00:05:32.520 be included in the debate. Frankly, the Greens probably shouldn't be included in the debate
00:05:36.680 either. But do you know why the PPC is not included in the debate? I know people are going to say it's
00:05:41.320 because the Debate Commission changed the rules. Why did they change the rules? Because the rules 0.92
00:05:46.200 didn't make any sense. Because the PPC, who got 5% of the vote last time, was just going to be able
00:05:51.760 to, or was going to be allowed to be automatically on the debate stage, even though in this election,
00:05:57.680 they actually missed an entire quarter of their country to have candidates in, and their support
00:06:03.420 has fallen off a cliff. Do you really think just because the party got 5% of the vote, more than 4%
00:06:09.520 last election, that they should automatically be on stage no matter where their support has shifted
00:06:14.800 over time? Imagine the 2021 election if there was just something called the Anti-Lockdown Party of
00:06:21.000 Canada. Maybe I would have cast a vote for it because I hated Aaron O'Toole and the Conservative
00:06:25.740 Party that he was running. They were basically just, you know, 5% better than the Liberals, which made
00:06:30.800 them not worth voting for. Let's say the Anti-Lockdown Party of Canada gets 8% of the vote.
00:06:35.760 And then, next election, they're only around 0.1% of the vote, 0.5% in the averages, because
00:06:43.360 obviously the purpose of the party has completely died off. Who even cares if they're running a
00:06:48.460 candidate in every single riding? If there's no real prospect that any Canadian is going to
00:06:53.640 seriously consider voting for them, why should they immediately automatically get a leader debate
00:06:59.620 position when nobody is expecting them to even come close to winning a seat? That is the
00:07:05.560 problem for the PPC. Doesn't matter what they got last election, they didn't come close to winning
00:07:09.560 a seat in 2019, 2021, and they definitely aren't coming close in 2025, not even running a full slate
00:07:16.540 of candidates this time. Anyway, so that's my PPC debate rant. I've wanted to make a standalone video
00:07:22.060 on that for a while, but this will have to do a random rant in the middle of my simulator video.
00:07:27.640 So I don't actually think the Liberals are going to be doing 43.7% in this election. I don't think
00:07:35.480 they're going to be getting under 40% unless Carney's debate performance goes really bad. I think they're
00:07:41.720 mostly going to be just, you know, getting a little bit over 40. There are a lot of people, as we have
00:07:47.440 seen in other polls, people who voted Liberal in 2021 hate the Liberal Party right now. So I would find it
00:07:54.560 very hard to believe that the Liberals would go from 32.5% of the vote in 2021 all the way up to
00:08:00.680 effectively 44. I could see them getting more around 41.5%. Good, really good improvement for
00:08:09.020 the Liberals, and they're mostly benefiting from the collapse of the NDP, but they're not going to be
00:08:14.120 in the mid-40s from my personal perspective. Okay, now let's move on to the Conservative Party,
00:08:21.740 because I'll say right off the bat, 37.4% feels very low for the Conservatives. Really, again,
00:08:29.420 it's only this low because of pollsters like ECOS and, not Nanos as much, but ECOS and Angus Reid and
00:08:37.120 MQD being mixed in that put the Conservatives sometimes all the way back at 33%. Does anyone
00:08:43.920 seriously think that in this election, the Conservative Party of Canada is going to do worse,
00:08:50.400 if not just around the same amount that O'Toole did when he was ticking off the Conservative base?
00:08:56.160 Conservative base really likes Polyev, and we know this because when you poll 2021 Conservative voters,
00:09:01.800 most of them, the vast, vast, vast majority, like above 90% of them are voting Conservative this time,
00:09:07.540 whereas with the Liberals, it's only like 82% are still voting Liberal in this next election.
00:09:13.040 The only reason the Liberals have still been gaining is just from savaging the NDP and the Greens' vote
00:09:17.860 share, as well as the Bloc Québécois in Quebec. So I am going to just say off the bat, I think the
00:09:24.480 Conservatives can get 40% in this election. I think based on good turnout, based on young,
00:09:30.140 working class men who usually don't vote showing up, I think 40% is extremely achievable for the 0.98
00:09:35.940 Conservatives. Now, don't get me wrong, I think the Conservatives can do better than 40%, but at this
00:09:41.640 current moment, without the debate having occurred, without knowing how that's going to shake up the
00:09:45.600 race, let's just assume baseline, with all the money the Conservatives have, 40% is like default, it's
00:09:51.520 hard for them to underachieve that. Now, the NDP. So right now, we are at 99% of the vote allocated.
00:09:59.000 I'm just going to also say, and the PPC is going to be at like 0.8. I don't see them doing anywhere
00:10:06.760 close to what they did in 2021, and honestly, I don't see them even doing as well as in 2019.
00:10:12.120 Polyev has basically done a lot of the things many of the people in the PPC wanted, and the only
00:10:18.640 people who are really left voting for the PPC, some of them have good reasons, some of them really
00:10:23.020 don't like certain positions the Conservative Party has currently taken. But the vast majority of people
00:10:27.720 who voted PPC in previous elections have been satisfied with the move to the right that the
00:10:32.700 Conservative Party has made, and many people who are left over are really just party insiders and
00:10:38.520 purists who were repping the party in 2021, and it's almost become part of their personality to
00:10:44.260 keep repping it. Okay, so I put them down at 0.8, and now only 98.4% of the vote is allocated. Again,
00:10:53.960 I'll probably cut it off around 99.5 or 99.6. Now, let's move on to the Greens. The Greens are actually
00:11:01.860 fielding fewer candidates than the PPC, but they do have two incumbents. Do I think they're going to
00:11:08.400 be at 1.9? They had 2.3 last time. 1.9 is probably fine for them, because Elizabeth May and the leader
00:11:17.300 of the party, her co-leader, are probably going to get enough attention to at least pump up their
00:11:21.660 numbers in British Columbia and certain parts of Ontario in the southwest where their current seat
00:11:26.580 is in Guelph. I'm just going to leave them at that. Maybe we can adjust that bit later. Now, the NDP.
00:11:32.640 The NDP is truly the wild card of this election. That is why some pollsters, I don't really trust
00:11:39.580 them too much. I even like the way that Main Street Research does its polls, but when they consistently
00:11:44.700 have the NDP at like 6.4% or 5% sometimes or 7%, no, I'm actually going to show you something on screen
00:11:57.100 that somebody commented at me on X as of just like an hour or two ago. This guy made the very incisive
00:12:05.300 point that if you actually look at the NDP's track record over the past two decades, they have never
00:12:12.220 done worse than 15.6% of the vote. Yes, Jack Layton was the leader back in 2004, but he didn't even have
00:12:19.500 a seat in 2004. And so in 2004, 2006, 2008, they usually got from 15 to 18%. And even when Jagmeet
00:12:29.400 Singh took over, he got 15.9 in 2019, and in 2021, he got 17.8. Now, is Jagmeet Singh going to do very
00:12:38.360 well this election? Heck no, Jagmeet Singh is terrible at politics. He's not even exactly a
00:12:44.520 stupid guy. He was a fairly, you know, well-acclaimed lawyer. The man is very highly educated, but he just
00:12:51.800 has no instinct for politics. I think he's generally going to do fine on the debate stage, especially
00:12:56.780 compared to Mark Carney and also doing better than him in the French debate because he in fact speaks
00:13:02.700 much better French than Mark Carney. In fact, I actually think in a strange way, there is a
00:13:08.280 capacity for Jagmeet Singh to be a breakout star of the debate. Is it because he has good ideas? No,
00:13:15.120 it's just going to be that people haven't heard of him the entire time. And if Mark Carney underperforms,
00:13:20.480 he is going to be seen as some sort of dark horse figure from the debate who said a lot of things that
00:13:26.640 the media, you know, nodded at and thought was very intellectual when it's socialist nonsense. But again,
00:13:31.800 if Carney ends up flopping, Jagmeet Singh, for many people on the left, it will look like a highly
00:13:38.900 competent figure in comparison if you want more hard left politics. So let's get back to the chart.
00:13:46.400 Do I think they're going to be going to be at 8.5%? No. Again, I think you're probably going to have
00:13:52.840 these guys around 9, 9.5. I put them at 9.5. So we're at now 99.4% of the vote.
00:14:01.800 And maybe let's put the Greens a little bit further down because of the lack of candidates
00:14:06.440 compared to last time. Although last time, I think they even had fewer candidates.
00:14:09.720 It's actually never mind. No, I'll put them back up. Let's put the NDP a little bit further down.
00:14:14.300 Let's assume the pollsters are picking up on a dislike of them. But now I want to put the
00:14:20.000 Bloc Québécois up a little bit more because again, I really don't see this being an election where the
00:14:25.820 Bloc completely falls apart and loses all their seats outside of Montreal. When I say outside
00:14:31.960 Montreal, they don't have any Montreal seats or outside the one they won in a by-election.
00:14:35.580 By mean all their strength is outside Montreal. I don't see them losing all of that ground that
00:14:39.740 they've been gaining over the past few elections. I think they're mostly going to hold on to what
00:14:44.300 they have. So let's look at this. We're going to assume the Liberal Party of Canada is going to get
00:14:49.840 41.5% of the vote, Conservatives 40, the NDP 9.2, the Greens 2, Bloc 6.1, and the PPC 0.8% of the
00:14:59.180 vote. So in the previous average, they gave the Liberals 197 seats and the Conservatives 121.
00:15:06.440 Now let's get the seat projections for the new mix that we've put in here. And now we get a tie ball
00:15:12.500 game between the Liberals and the Conservatives of 153 to 153, with the NDP having 11 seats,
00:15:19.840 the Bloc with 2, and the BQ with 25. Now reminder that this wouldn't even really be enough for Carney
00:15:26.440 to have a functional minority if he demanded that he stay on as Prime Minister because he won the
00:15:31.620 popular vote and has the same amount of seats as the Conservatives. But he wouldn't be able to get
00:15:35.960 anything done because even with the NDP and the Greens, he is still short of a majority. And the
00:15:41.360 Bloc Québécois have made their entire brand the fact they don't want the Liberals to be in power
00:15:45.980 anymore. Because obviously, the Liberals are actually a massive threat to the Bloc's brand
00:15:51.240 at this point. The Bloc has been having its vote taken away by the Liberals. So by working with the
00:15:57.200 Liberals, they would just be doing the same thing that Jagmeet Singh had been doing since 2019,
00:16:01.540 making themselves utterly irrelevant by capitulating to the party that's currently eating away at their
00:16:07.260 support base. So 153 to 153. But let's say the Conservatives can do a little bit better than
00:16:15.460 just 40% and the Liberals do a little bit worse. Let's bump it down to 41 to 40.5. Again, this is
00:16:23.440 99.6% of the vote allocated around a realistic amount for all the major parties. What do we get
00:16:30.260 coming out of this? We now have 160 for the Conservatives to 145 for the Liberals, 11 for the
00:16:37.600 NDP still, one for the Greens, and 26 for the Bloc Québécois. Honestly, I actually might bump that
00:16:43.200 up a little bit for the Greens because I actually assume their guy in Guelph will be able to hold
00:16:46.060 onto a seat as well as Elizabeth May. And that gets us to 159 to 144. It actually takes one from
00:16:53.060 the Conservatives there. So this is being pretty fair in my opinion. But yeah, I'm not trying to say
00:16:59.880 like based on tinkering around because you've seen that I've had to put the Conservative bar up and
00:17:04.200 the Liberal bar down. Again, I don't feel like I am wish casting here because I think the polls have
00:17:10.860 been heavily leaning towards the Liberals in an unrealistic fashion. And this simulator is based
00:17:16.680 on that aggregation out there and only giving you a range of a couple points up or down.
00:17:22.560 Considering that this is giving the Conservatives very close to a majority
00:17:26.380 with a actually trailing popular vote amount is really good news for the Conservatives. And again,
00:17:34.640 I think these guys will actually be able to work with the Bloc Québécois if push comes to shove and
00:17:40.300 Paulyev falls short of a majority by even 15 seats or so. You can have the Bloc work with them.
00:17:47.420 Don't touch equalization. Don't touch a few other items. Cut taxes. Do some other basic stuff.
00:17:52.620 And you can probably actually then translate that minority government in this election into a majority
00:17:58.680 sometime in 2026 or 2027. This is what happened with Stephen Harper. He didn't need to win a majority
00:18:05.280 in 2006 or 2008. He just basically needed to make the case that he was on the inside track of what
00:18:13.440 Canadians wanted, was able to push through some of his legislation in those first two terms. And then
00:18:18.680 once his opposition got too uppity, he could say, give me the full majority. And eventually Canadians 0.72
00:18:23.820 did give it to him. So again, I assumed well before this, if the Conservatives even wanted a minority
00:18:29.780 government, they would have to be beating the Liberals 43% or 41% to like 38 or 39. They would have to
00:18:37.420 actually beat the Liberals by three points just to get a minority government. Now we see that the
00:18:43.840 Conservatives could get a minority government with actually less of the vote than the Liberals have.
00:18:50.220 Actually, let's just see if I can screw around. Can I actually get a Conservative majority out of this
00:18:53.940 based on the current rates? Can we do this? Can we actually do it? I'm just very curious at this
00:19:01.740 point. Let's say the PPC collapses all the way down to 0.5%. No, it's really hard at this point to
00:19:07.920 actually come out with a get an outcome like that. But I'll link that down in the description below as
00:19:13.540 well as pinned at the top of the comments. You guys can play around with that. I think, again, this is
00:19:19.620 demonstrating that there has been a fundamental realignment in Canadian politics, that the
00:19:24.880 Conservatives are obviously still going to be doing well in Alberta and Saskatchewan. And while they might
00:19:30.560 actually drop a seat or two in those provinces, they may more than make up for it in southwestern
00:19:37.840 Ontario, in certain parts of the GTA, in certain parts of Quebec, in Atlanta, Canada, and in British
00:19:44.760 Columbia, in those working class neighborhoods, especially Winnipeg, a heavy union province and a
00:19:50.860 heavy union city. The Conservatives have been getting all of the private sector labor unions endorsing
00:19:56.540 them. I don't think any of them have actually endorsed the NDP or the Liberals outside of those
00:20:01.840 white-collar public sector unions like QP and whatnot. So look up, guys. I think it's actually
00:20:09.960 very hopeful for the Conservatives right now. And again, we are talking about all this pre-debate.
00:20:15.980 If Polyev can put Carney in a corner, he doesn't need to, again, pants the guy and push him off the stage.
00:20:21.080 He just needs to basically demonstrate that this guy is kind of a bit of a slouch. He's not very
00:20:26.300 confident. I can best him in a debate. Doesn't mean, again, he has to dunk on the guy, but if he can
00:20:31.300 look more confident, more assertive, and like he has more definite plans that appeal to the base
00:20:37.800 values of Canadians, he can absolutely start punching up two or three points in the polls and be in this
00:20:44.000 winning position. And again, a winning position only requires the Conservatives to win like 155 seats,
00:20:49.980 157 seats, and have the Liberals come around like 140 or 137, something like that. So anyways,
00:20:58.100 that should be it for this video today, guys. Hopefully you don't mind me sitting there playing
00:21:02.800 around with charts and kind of talking about non-news items, but I always find the stats
00:21:07.900 interesting, and I do know a bunch of you do find the stats interesting, similar to myself. So anyways,
00:21:13.700 like the video, subscribe to the channel, leave a comment, let me know what you think the actual
00:21:18.040 percentage outcome is going to be between the Liberals and Conservatives on Election Day,
00:21:22.220 and I'll see you guys all next time.