ECOS pollster Frank Graves is a clown, and he should be locked up for his own good, because he's been taking some crazy pills and now his brain is full of clown soup. I'll explain why, and why he needs to step down.
00:00:00.000It's no secret that I like to talk about polling on this channel, but what's so funny to me is that usually nobody demands that I cover a poll,
00:00:10.080but this week I've been getting multiple demands to talk yet again about the ECOS poll that Frank Graves released
00:00:18.040that supposedly shows that the liberals have nearly caught up with the federal conservatives.
00:00:24.400This is complete nonsense, and I think that Frank Graves and ECOS are basically just trying to rig public opinion.
00:00:35.200They're simply wanting to show you a poll like this, showing the liberals within three points of the conservatives,
00:00:41.340to generate the idea that maybe the liberals are back.
00:00:45.700Maybe the liberals have cleaned up their act and they deserve a second chance.
00:00:49.680Polls like this, to be very clear, are not actually going to change public opinion.
00:00:56.180It's not like if Canadians see enough polls like this, they're going to vote liberal.
00:00:59.800The vast majority of Canadians hate the liberals.
00:01:03.360I cannot put enough of an emphasis on the word hate when I say that Canadians hate the liberals.
00:01:09.300Look at any government approval ratings from any of the other pollsters.
00:01:13.040Aside from Trudeau, who has approval ratings equivalent to the bubonic plague,
00:01:19.040the government itself has equally bad polling numbers.
00:01:23.880Maybe Trudeau moving on will increase them?
00:01:26.840Okay, but you will have to increase them by 10 to 20 points to actually be in the next federal election as a real player.
00:01:35.160Any of the other pollsters, even with a liberal bump, and I do believe the liberals will get a bump from Trudeau moving on,
00:01:42.020will still not be anywhere close to actually winning enough seats.
00:04:04.640I just have a problem with ECOS in general.
00:04:07.480Even when I saw them give the liberals or the conservatives a 25% lead, even in the back of my head, I kind of laughed at that, that somehow Frank Graves was even in the ballpark of what other pollsters were like.
00:04:22.420But I guarantee you, when Frank Graves said that the conservatives were ahead 25 points, it was because he was trying to help shove Trudeau out of the prime minister's office to install Carney or Freeland.
00:04:36.080Everything Frank Graves has done over the past two years has been motivated by political ends, not simply a pollster trying to be accurate.
00:04:52.780And it kind of does seem like an idle threat when you delete it.
00:05:15.320But it seems like he has at least stayed true to his commitment that he's going to try and keep Pierre Polly out of office.
00:05:22.960Because this polling trend, it goes up for the conservatives when he's trying to agitate against Trudeau.
00:05:29.040That other hump you see there is back in October or earlier in the year when there were initial calls for Trudeau to step down.
00:05:35.560So when Frank Graves needs Trudeau to step down, conservative polling goes up.
00:05:40.300When Trudeau starts stabilizing, it comes back down.
00:05:42.760And when there's a renewed push to get him out of office, then he spikes it again to give the incentive to Freeland and others to tell Trudeau to go take a dirt nap.
00:05:52.320And now that he needs a narrative to say that the liberals are actually making a comeback because of all the energy, all that raw energy that they're generating from their leadership race,
00:06:04.580he then starts to show that the two parties are catching up.
00:06:42.540All the polling trend, other than Sheree Attiste and PoliWave, 338 Canada, all the other polling projectors and modelers on social media or who have their own websites,
00:06:55.980are still carrying ecos and pretending like they're legitimate and not just removing their weighting to basically say, yeah, I guess they released a poll, but we don't put anything into it.
00:07:10.900We have seen the People's Party of Canada in ridings where they got 5.6% last election, places like Cloverdale, Langley City.
00:07:20.860When there is a by-election where it, in fact, should be easier for a small party to gain a larger percentage of the vote because, in theory, your hardcore base is going to show up and then you're going to get, instead of 5%, you're going to get 9%.
00:07:35.860Simply because the same, like, 1,200 people show up for you in the by-election or 800 people where the other party's votes are, like, half, so your vote actually goes up.
00:07:47.360The People's Party in places like Cloverdale, Langley City, where they got 5.6%, only got 0.9% in by-elections.
00:08:33.960Nowhere was there a riding in Atlanta, Canada, that I believe they got more than 10% in the last election.
00:08:40.520But multiple ridings in the Prairies, they actually did score above 10% in very rural ridings, like Portage Lisger, where Maxime Bernier ran in that by-election.
00:08:51.620But he also lost votes compared to 2021, because it's not a confidently-run party.
00:08:56.580The Green Party, in this poll, Green Party, got 5% in Atlantic Canada, 5.2% in Quebec, 5.5% in Ontario, and 5.1% in BC and the territories.
00:09:09.860That one makes sense, because Elizabeth May has a riding there.
00:09:28.160This is not an actual thing that people recognize.
00:09:31.140And you can tell what Frank Graves is doing here, because he's weighted university-educated people as being an extremely high portion of the electorate.
00:09:41.620And then he doesn't correct for the fact that in many of these provinces, where he has really wacky results, just completely wild, out-of-left-field results, like his previous poll was even weirder.
00:09:55.800It seems like he's correcting to make this poll seem more legitimate, even as the actual overall top-line results get more insane.
00:10:04.620Because as he gets the Liberals coming closer to the Conservatives, that is so unrealistic.
00:10:08.900But to make it seem realistic, he's corrected from his last poll, where the Greens were at 18% in Atlantic Canada in his subcharts, before he had cooked the numbers to look good on the national side.
00:10:20.220This is just a ploy to try and get Liberal donors to give money to the party.
00:10:24.680So that Liberal people can go to their donor networks and say, hey guys, we're within 3% now because Carney's running.
00:10:32.920Carney has no chance of winning, at all.
00:10:35.620Now I'm going to show you just how off these polls are.
00:10:46.620This is 338's kind of bullseye chart, where this is rating polls on how much more they poll the Liberals or Conservatives up or down below what the 338 average is.
00:11:01.540So that Canadian maple leaf right in the middle, that is the 338 average, and all these gray dots are past polls and where they've been.
00:11:09.140So on the right, you see Liberal Party higher than 338 average, and on the left, it's the Liberal Party polling lower than the 338 average.
00:11:17.280Above is the Conservative Party polling more than the 338 average currently has them.
00:11:22.480And then, of course, if you go south, it is the Conservative Party polling lower than the 338 average previously was.
00:11:31.680And a bunch of new polls show things shifting a little bit in favor of the Liberals and a little bit away from the Conservatives.
00:11:56.080And then you have a couple other polls, Ipsos Research Code, Angus Reid, that show the Liberal Party still falling down since Trudeau stepped down,
00:12:04.620or the Liberal Parties have stabilized a bit, but the Conservatives are continuing to increase.
00:12:08.760Do you want to see where, and this is, you know, Abacus, Leger, Nanos, Palace, Main Street,
00:12:13.820they all show the Liberals improving a bit as time goes on by a few percent.