The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - December 04, 2023


Liberals polling deficit is deeper than you think

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Pierre Poilievre Jagmeet Singh Justin Trudeau Erin O'Toole Andrew Scheer Elizabeth May Michael Kim Doug Ford Ledger Nanos Adam
Government Subsides Ruined Canadian Media Man Going To Trial For Heckling Trudeau

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

191.03

Word count

2,996

Sentence count

138

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about why I think the Tories are actually under-represented in the polls, and why that's a good thing. I also talk about the importance of the concept of revealed vs. stated preference, and how it can be applied in real life.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.240 Ever since I started regularly making videos for this channel, I've been mocking members of the legacy media for making the absurd claim that Pierre Polyev, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, was unpopular or somehow hurting the brand appeal of the Conservative Party with moderate Canadians.
00:00:15.040 This went on for several months after Polyev became the Conservative Party leader, which was a weird sleight of hand trick whereby they were technically correct that Pierre Polyev wasn't very popular by polling both personally and for the Conservative Party of Canada for the first few months of his leadership.
00:00:30.700 But that's because every single opposition leader makes it look like their party picked wrong when they made them leader, because in the first few months of their leadership, nobody knows who they are, and they are not able to have a positive effect on the party's popularity unless a massive celebrity becomes the party leader like Justin Trudeau was back in 2013 because he had high name recognition because of his father.
00:00:53.260 With Pierre Polyev, after about eight or so months, he actually started clicking with people, people started recognizing his name, and name recognition matters a lot.
00:01:01.820 People like people that they recognize. Nobody likes a party leader that they do not know from Adam.
00:01:08.120 Andrew Scheer and Aaron O'Toole had this problem where by election day, I'd be shocked if 70% of people who cast ballots could even name them as the Conservative Party leader.
00:01:17.820 Pierre Polyev has shot up in popularity not only because he has high name recognition these days,
00:01:22.540 but he actually talks about the issues that people want to hear about.
00:01:26.020 But this is just to say that for a while, he wasn't very popular, and he slowly gained popularity over time.
00:01:32.120 And during that popularity gain, I was usually pretty cautious at not wanting to declare a spike in Conservative Party appeal until I saw multiple polling companies picking up on the rise in popularity.
00:01:43.660 So when there was just a couple of pollsters like Main Street and Abacus showing the Conservative Party punching above like 36% and 37%, you know, going above 10% over the Liberals,
00:01:54.740 I usually wanted to wait until I saw Nanos, Ledger, you know, Think HQ and some of the other ones also mirror their takes.
00:02:01.620 Just so because obviously, if you aggregate all these polls together, they were usually still only around 6% above the Liberals because pollsters like Ledger were only showing the Conservatives up like one or two points and sometimes even the Liberals up a point.
00:02:14.520 But these days, I think I've almost sort of gone in the opposite direction where now that the Conservatives are decisively ahead by 14, 15, and even sometimes 18 points above the Liberals,
00:02:26.040 I actually think that the Conservatives are being under-polled right now.
00:02:30.140 And I think it's because the Conservatives have hit the ceiling of how high they will ever kind of go in public popularity polls unless something dramatic happens.
00:02:39.760 Like if Polly have saved a puppy on television, he can hit 52% if he wants.
00:02:44.300 I don't see the Conservative Party going past 45% in any poll before the next election.
00:02:50.280 And I think it is because of the concept of revealed preference versus stated preference.
00:02:55.720 I think in Canada, because of the bias in the legacy media and just the culture in general towards more center-left parties to prove you're not a dirty American who likes conservative right-wing politics,
00:03:08.020 a lot of Canadians, I think, whenever you poll them, are not going to admit that they're Conservative Party supporters.
00:03:14.000 And don't get me wrong, we're having polls where the Conservative Party is at 42%, 38%, 41% in the polls.
00:03:20.960 That's quite a hefty chunk of the electorate, and it's easily the biggest chunk of the polling right now.
00:03:28.300 The NDP is usually around 19%, 20%.
00:03:30.920 The Liberals are anywhere from 22% to like 26%.
00:03:34.440 There, obviously, the Conservatives are doing very well.
00:03:37.140 But at the same time, I think the Conservatives, rather than being at about 41% or 42% like many of the polls are showing,
00:03:44.300 I think in reality they're probably more at like 45% or 46%.
00:03:48.480 And I just want to quickly cover what revealed versus stated preference is, just so you know what I'm talking about,
00:03:53.760 before I sort of go on to why I think a lot of these polls are missing the lead the Conservative Party probably has,
00:03:59.660 and maybe they need to correct the way that they're collecting their data.
00:04:02.720 But what revealed and stated preference are, is stated preference is what you say to a pollster when you're asked what you think about something,
00:04:10.780 and your revealed preference is what you actually do when it comes down to making a decision in real life that's going to actually affect you.
00:04:16.900 So, one concept I heard recently, it was actually just yesterday, it was really interesting,
00:04:22.260 was when you survey customers at grocery stores, at what type of coffee they like,
00:04:27.300 everyone, when you give them tons of different descriptions of options to choose from,
00:04:31.460 they will mostly choose or disproportionately choose bold, strong coffee.
00:04:36.380 The problem is, is most people don't actually like bold, strong coffee.
00:04:40.120 Much like myself, most people buy mild or medium blends at the store,
00:04:44.440 and most people don't really like those more, what I would derogatorily describe as strong, inky, acrid coffee blends.
00:04:53.620 So, and the same thing goes with many other different types of products,
00:04:56.980 and including polling when it comes to elections.
00:04:59.760 I think what's happening with the conservatives is because, like I said before,
00:05:03.560 most people try and signal socially more to the left,
00:05:07.100 so that they see more sort of like, you know, progressive and trendy,
00:05:10.580 and not some sort of dark, demure social conservative or something like that.
00:05:14.600 They will sort of disproportionately say they're voting NDP, liberal, green, or they'll just abstain.
00:05:20.940 So, I think by the 2025 election, we're going to see the conservative party do way better than the current polling shows.
00:05:28.100 And I want to quickly just highlight a couple of results in some recent polls that don't really make sense
00:05:33.980 if the conservatives are truly ahead as much as they are.
00:05:37.840 So, I think they're actually being held back in some of these polls by province.
00:05:41.700 So, oddly enough, I'm going to start with my own province of Alberta.
00:05:45.000 You think that this wouldn't be a province where the conservative party has any problem polling really well,
00:05:51.040 and obviously they're way ahead.
00:05:52.280 They get 60% of the polls in Alberta.
00:05:54.060 But look at this result that they have in Alberta on Nanos' new poll,
00:05:59.040 which overall, I believe, shows that the conservatives are at 40%,
00:06:03.740 and the liberals are at 26%.
00:06:06.060 Sorry about this.
00:06:09.940 So, look at this.
00:06:10.520 So, the conservatives are at 60%, the liberals are at 15%,
00:06:13.720 and Jagme Singh's NDP's at 20%,
00:06:16.340 and Maxime Bernier's PPC are at 4%.
00:06:19.840 Now, that seems like it would be the type of gain that would be created under Pierre Polyev,
00:06:24.340 but that pretty much is all the results that were...
00:06:27.200 That's pretty much the results in Alberta in the last election.
00:06:30.600 Just look right here.
00:06:31.780 The liberals got 15.5%,
00:06:34.980 the conservatives got 55.3%,
00:06:36.920 and the NDP got 19.1%,
00:06:38.760 with Maxime Bernier's PPC getting 7.4%.
00:06:41.840 What we see here is basically every single gain that the conservative party has gotten
00:06:47.020 has only been at the expense of the PPC.
00:06:50.040 And maybe it's because NDP and liberal voters are so much more hardcore
00:06:53.920 for their parties that are in the province of Alberta
00:06:58.120 than people in other provinces are for the NDP and the liberals.
00:07:01.900 But I don't really think so.
00:07:03.220 I think there's just some people who are in Alberta
00:07:05.840 who don't quite want to say that they vote conservative
00:07:08.800 simply because of media propaganda around,
00:07:12.080 oh, you know, parental rights are dangerous,
00:07:13.880 and don't you know that Pierre Polyev is an ultra-mega-conservative
00:07:17.640 who's secretly an American or whatever the media is now saying about him?
00:07:21.980 But this trend holds up in other provinces.
00:07:24.720 So in Ontario, this current NANDOS poll shows that Pierre Polyev's conservatives
00:07:28.340 are at 41%.
00:07:29.380 That's a pretty good lead.
00:07:30.520 And you have 28% for the liberals and 22% for the NDP.
00:07:33.920 Now, this actually seems like a major departure for the liberals
00:07:39.920 when it comes to Ontario,
00:07:41.940 or it is a bit of a departure for the liberals.
00:07:44.360 So the liberals in 2021 had 39% of the vote.
00:07:49.080 The conservatives had 34% and the NDP had 17%
00:07:52.160 with Maxime Bernier's PPC getting 5.5%
00:07:54.960 and the Greens getting 2.2%.
00:07:56.520 Now, the difference here,
00:07:58.340 and what I sort of find I take an issue with,
00:08:01.100 is this means that the conservatives,
00:08:03.440 with the massive polling gains they've gotten,
00:08:05.500 you know, literally over 10% sometimes,
00:08:08.480 or 9% increases overall in the country,
00:08:11.540 that means they only benefited 5% in Ontario,
00:08:14.560 which seems a bit odd since the provincial left-wing party scene
00:08:18.120 is fairly weak right now when it comes to the liberals and the NDP.
00:08:22.100 So it's not like they're getting boosted by any local politicians.
00:08:24.320 And the PCs under Doug Ford are still hyper-popular in the province.
00:08:28.760 So you think that the conservatives would be able to get
00:08:31.980 just more than 5%,
00:08:33.500 more than Aaron O'Toole is able to achieve in 2021.
00:08:36.680 In my mind, that doesn't quite line up very well.
00:08:39.700 And I just want to grab this one poll of age preferences for voting
00:08:44.000 from this abacus data poll that just came out,
00:08:46.140 that I also think is a bit odd
00:08:48.040 when you consider sort of the implications
00:08:50.880 of where people are putting their votes in these polls
00:08:53.720 when reacting to the news.
00:08:55.940 So everyone knows up here that Justin Trudeau's policies have failed. 0.99
00:08:59.680 They also know that Jagmeet Singh is completely useless.
00:09:02.260 There's nothing Jagmeet Singh has done recently 0.96
00:09:04.340 that would lead anyone to come and vote for him.
00:09:06.440 And you could say, well, you're just using your opinion
00:09:08.200 because you're a conservative.
00:09:09.260 I tend to be able to be fairly decently able to sympathize
00:09:13.420 with the reason why left-wing voters vote the way they do.
00:09:16.440 I mean, genuine people, not people in these polls.
00:09:18.560 But I can generally point to sympathize with people saying
00:09:22.640 that they vote a certain way and why.
00:09:25.100 But there's not a lot of MDP voters
00:09:27.200 that you end up seeing these days
00:09:28.460 because Jagmeet Singh has kind of gotten people
00:09:30.380 to not trust him as someone
00:09:33.000 who could confidently run the country.
00:09:35.060 So this is why I'm a little bit skeptical
00:09:38.920 when I see a polling result of 30 to 44-year-olds
00:09:42.620 who are part of the Conservative Party's bread and butter.
00:09:45.760 Or the Conservative Party does really well with people between 30 and 59.
00:09:49.740 And somehow the NDP is pulling up 23% with people 30 to 44.
00:09:54.200 You know, that major taxpaying demographic.
00:09:57.280 And then the NDP is also doing really well with young people.
00:10:00.840 Now, I don't take issue with that one
00:10:01.980 because it makes sense they're doing well with young people.
00:10:04.040 I don't think that many people 18 to 29 are voting liberal, though.
00:10:07.920 So I find it a bit odd in this abacus poll
00:10:09.820 that liberals are doing as well as the NDP with younger people
00:10:13.260 because, generally speaking, it's the older people
00:10:16.160 that the liberals do disproportionately well with.
00:10:19.420 So, and also there was about 9% going to the Greens of people 18 to 29.
00:10:24.300 And I don't think that many young people pay enough attention to politics
00:10:27.340 to really be selecting the Green Party in these polls.
00:10:29.960 The Green Party is actually also a bit of an older party.
00:10:33.100 That's why people like Elizabeth May are extremely popular. 1.00
00:10:36.120 It's these kind of older green activists 1.00
00:10:37.940 who are what's propping up a lot of the Green Party's appeal.
00:10:42.020 So when I see polls coming out like this,
00:10:44.600 and I see the Conservative Party been stagnating
00:10:47.120 around this low 40s, high 30s area,
00:10:50.420 I think it's because we've now run into the time
00:10:53.420 when people are just simply not comfortable
00:10:56.340 with saying that they're voting Conservative.
00:10:58.100 So we've hit the limit of how many people actually admit to it.
00:11:01.120 And if there's one more thing I can quickly bring up,
00:11:03.360 I think that will make my point clear.
00:11:05.540 It's this Nanos research poll
00:11:07.940 because they always do issue polling
00:11:09.940 and I find some of their issue polling a little bit silly.
00:11:13.080 So what you'll see here is all the different issues since 2020.
00:11:17.720 I think the very start of March of 2020 or so.
00:11:21.980 Sorry, I have too many overlays.
00:11:23.720 I have to delete a couple first.
00:11:25.240 Sorry, I'm seemingly dragging about this video,
00:11:27.800 but I didn't actually upload my overlays before I hit record.
00:11:30.620 So you're seeing me do this all on the fly.
00:11:32.180 But this is what I mean by reveal preference
00:11:34.460 versus stated preference
00:11:35.560 and why I think that the Conservatives are being held back.
00:11:38.260 Just look at the way environment pulls on issues
00:11:41.860 in these Nanos pulls. 0.84
00:11:43.180 Back in early 2020, you have an environment spiked
00:11:47.600 at over 20% of what people say that they care about
00:11:51.340 in terms of like top issues.
00:11:54.440 So you have environment basically on par
00:11:57.220 with jobs and economy at the start of 2020
00:11:59.400 because, you know, jobs and economy,
00:12:01.540 or actually it's way over jobs and economy
00:12:03.240 and then jobs and economy takeover
00:12:04.460 because COVID is going on.
00:12:05.760 I would say that's a real,
00:12:07.580 that's not, that's when I say like,
00:12:09.100 that's a state preference,
00:12:09.840 I think it's pretty accurate
00:12:11.020 because so many people just lost their jobs.
00:12:12.740 But as you go through this,
00:12:14.040 every once in a while,
00:12:14.600 you see the green bar that for environmental issues
00:12:16.720 re-spike. 0.99
00:12:17.940 And I don't think that that's actually proving
00:12:20.420 a real preference among Canadian voters
00:12:22.240 for environmental issues.
00:12:24.260 How many people do you actually talk to
00:12:26.200 in a given election cycle?
00:12:28.040 If you ever talk to anyone about
00:12:29.440 who they're voting for and how they're voting,
00:12:30.840 I talk to a lot of people at the doors.
00:12:33.240 During the provincial election, 2023,
00:12:35.800 it is a conservative province,
00:12:37.260 but like Calgary was very divided.
00:12:40.200 I did over 20, 25, 30 instances of door knocking
00:12:44.360 during the provincial election.
00:12:45.840 I did a lot of stuff behind the scenes
00:12:47.160 in terms of like digital marketing.
00:12:49.540 But whenever I was out the door,
00:12:50.740 you'd be shocked that I'd probably only,
00:12:53.440 not shocked actually,
00:12:54.360 you'd probably, you'd expect this, I guess,
00:12:56.120 but I think the average person
00:12:57.140 who takes these polls seriously would be shocked
00:12:58.520 that maybe two people the entire time
00:13:01.060 said that environment was a top issue for them.
00:13:03.260 And usually they also named two or three other things
00:13:06.100 like healthcare and education.
00:13:07.280 It was kind of like the gambit of NDP provincial issues.
00:13:10.840 So like education, healthcare,
00:13:12.020 and then they throw in the environment thing in there.
00:13:14.060 People are not picking environment
00:13:15.940 at anything above one or 2% of people
00:13:18.520 who are actually showing up and voting
00:13:20.180 at the polls for the environmental issues specifically.
00:13:23.760 People are not showing up to the polls
00:13:25.540 specifically to save the trees.
00:13:27.740 It's just not happening.
00:13:28.900 People mostly are always going to show up
00:13:30.840 for affordability, jobs,
00:13:34.780 maybe some social programs,
00:13:36.900 you know, sort of like pro-life type social issues.
00:13:39.880 And then you get your hyper-progressive voters
00:13:41.780 on the other side of those kinds of issues.
00:13:43.500 You're not having a lot of environmental issues.
00:13:45.800 So when you see a lot of polls like this,
00:13:47.540 you're going to get a lot of people answering surveys
00:13:49.880 who are answering surveys based on what they think people
00:13:52.820 taking the surveys want to hear
00:13:54.960 or what they think the overall culture thinks
00:13:57.620 is the correct answer.
00:13:58.720 So even though Justin Trudeau is on the outs
00:14:01.600 and Jagmeet Singh is too,
00:14:03.040 I don't think there's enough people
00:14:04.400 who have quite broken through the idea
00:14:06.880 that you're allowed to be a conservative
00:14:08.520 to actually demonstrate properly
00:14:10.980 what the conservative's real lead is right now.
00:14:13.800 I don't think that when we see just a pure poly
00:14:16.340 of packing in crowds and traditionally liberal ridings
00:14:19.600 and Trudeau's now having to lower the prices
00:14:21.440 for his, you know, little fundraiser dinners,
00:14:24.800 that's demonstrative that the liberals
00:14:28.100 have not just lost, you know, six, seven points.
00:14:30.960 They've lost, like they've gained the apathy
00:14:34.400 of so many of their own supporters.
00:14:35.800 I doubt they're actually showing up to vote for them.
00:14:37.880 But these people are still saying liberal on the phone
00:14:40.260 because they don't want to admit
00:14:41.420 that they're going to vote conservative
00:14:42.540 or they're just don't care anymore.
00:14:44.340 And they didn't, but for some reason,
00:14:46.000 they didn't say, I don't know,
00:14:47.080 or I'm not voting like the pollsters usually ask you.
00:14:50.760 Anyways, that should be it for me today.
00:14:52.980 If you want to go check out my fundraiser,
00:14:54.940 I'm being sued by a billionaire.
00:14:56.240 I'm winning that lawsuit.
00:14:57.560 I'm $25,000 deep in it though.
00:14:59.960 So if you want to slip in some money
00:15:01.300 to my Give, Send, Go fundraiser,
00:15:02.860 that really helps me out.
00:15:04.780 And if you also can,
00:15:05.980 you can check out my website
00:15:07.080 for my Calgary Signal Hill
00:15:08.860 Conservative Party nomination run.
00:15:10.800 If you live in Calgary Signal Hill,
00:15:12.440 buy a Conservative Party membership.
00:15:14.620 If you live with anyone else,
00:15:16.360 get them to buy memberships too.
00:15:17.800 If they're 14 years old or older,
00:15:20.020 really helps me out.
00:15:21.020 I want to hopefully have a real conservative
00:15:22.840 representing Calgary Signal Hill.
00:15:24.900 So hopefully buy a membership,
00:15:26.180 vote for me, number one,
00:15:27.320 vote for Michael Kim, number two.
00:15:28.660 He's actually good.
00:15:29.600 The nomination is probably not happening
00:15:30.660 for five, six months anyways,
00:15:32.000 but just make sure you're all locked in early
00:15:34.700 so I don't have to remind you again.
00:15:38.880 Anyways, that should be it for me today.
00:15:40.340 Have a great day, everyone.