Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party are polling way behind the Conservatives in the polls, and it's getting worse by the day. In this episode, I discuss how bad things have gotten for the Liberals, and why it's time for a new Prime Minister.
00:00:00.280Polling is looking absolutely supremely bad for Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party these days.
00:00:04.680I'm actually kind of shocked at how bad it's gotten.
00:00:07.300Like, obviously, I'm not shocked in the sense that Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party are awful.
00:00:11.480And they've been, like, you know, making the lives of Canadians far worse since they've been around over the past eight years.
00:00:16.500But at the same time, I think I'm also shocked, like a lot of other people, because the Liberal Party has usually been very robust in polling.
00:00:22.240It almost doesn't matter what they do.
00:00:24.100They always poll fairly well, you know, despite all their policy failures, despite all the scandals they generate, most people will usually vote for them enough that they're always within one to three points of the Conservatives, whether they're ahead or behind.
00:00:37.660But these days, everything has soured on them so much, you almost wonder if it's just that there's something that's clicked in Canadians' heads where they finally reach the moment where they're just kind of done with them and they want to move on to something new.
00:00:48.940Like, I guess that's backed up by a lot of the recent polling showing that even people who vote Liberal or NDP would like to see there be a new Prime Minister in this country and that they'd be more likely to vote for the Liberal Party if they actually change it up.
00:01:01.440At the same time, Justin Trudeau is kind of stuck in the rock, between a rock and a hard place, because there's also about half of his party where if he leaves, they'll also abandon the party.
00:01:09.000So it's kind of a, you know, like they're going to lose whether they make changes or not.
00:01:12.820It's kind of, it's become a no-win scenario for the Liberals.
00:01:16.080But it's gotten even worse somehow, because Brian Breguet from Too Close to Call just released seat projection numbers based off of an unreleased Abacus data poll, showing that the Liberal Party could be literally winning less than 100 seats by the next election.
00:01:30.460And remember, they won 164 seats for their majority, or 184 seats for their majority in 2015.
00:01:37.960And now the Conservatives could be winning 187 seats.
00:01:41.380They could be outperforming the Liberals from 2015 in this new 2025 election, and the Liberals could be down to just 91 seats, which would be a 69 seat loss.
00:01:52.980And this is not just this one seat projection.
00:01:54.940If you've been paying any attention, the Conservatives have been polling in the low end, four points above the Liberals, and those are usually outlier polls these days.
00:02:04.960And based off of how bad that seat projection is from that Abacus data poll that Brian has generated, I could see the Conservatives being 12 to 13 points ahead in that specific poll.
00:02:15.280And one of the big problems was that the Liberals have been robust in the last few elections because they were super, super concentrated in the GTA area.
00:02:24.120So even if they were only polling at 27%, 30%, they could still rely on winning the most seats simply because their vote was very concentrated in ridings where they only needed about 27%, 28% of the vote to win because of just how cut up the riding was between the Greens, NDP, and the Conservative Party.
00:02:42.620They could literally get away with these, like, really, really fringe victories with, like, very few voters.
00:02:48.420But these days, I think they've fallen so far that they don't have any particular base that likes them.
00:02:54.280If you will keep up with the demographic polling, they used to lead fairly significantly with women and usually older voters, which is kind of funny because in, like, if you go to the U.S., the more left-wing party, the Democrats, are usually a far younger party.
00:03:07.660In Canada, the Liberals have actually always kind of been known to be an older party, and then the NDP takes sort of the left-wing younger vote.
00:03:14.560But these days, the Conservatives are literally leading with every demographic, men, women, you know, old, young, it doesn't matter.
00:03:21.600They're especially leading with millennial voters, which has become the biggest section of voters.
00:03:26.960And, like, right now, the Liberals don't even lead in Quebec or the Maritimes.
00:03:31.560I think the Maritimes are effectively a statistical tie.
00:03:34.800And in Quebec, the bloc leads with the Liberals, like, a little bit behind.
00:03:38.480And even the Conservatives are not that distant of a third these days, which is usually one of those provinces that the Liberals could be fairly confident in the Conservatives not performing well in.
00:03:48.240But these days, like, the Conservatives could win, you know, 10 seats or so, which is nothing to sneeze at.
00:03:53.520But with all these polling showing that the Liberals are behind the Conservatives and the Conservatives are actually pressing towards 40%,
00:04:01.340I don't see Justin Trudeau being able to survive any of this.
00:04:05.140And I think it's because they've both radicalized the Liberal Party base towards never being able to admit that Justin Trudeau has made a mistake.
00:04:14.000At the same time, they've alienated some of their base who have become very much done with how undynamic the party is.
00:04:19.580That doesn't matter how bad their public policy is.
00:04:21.980They only double down, in part because they are in a partnership with the NDP.
00:04:25.800So they have no incentive to moderate because the NDP probably won't let them.
00:04:29.860Like, as weak and pathetic as Jagmeet Singh is, at least Jagmeet Singh probably isn't so pathetic if Justin Trudeau starts trying to cut spending that Jagmeet Singh won't try and block Trudeau.
00:04:39.920But I think that one big part of it, too, is that Pierre Polyev is actually having his name recognition skyrocket these days.
00:04:47.740Whereas, you know, in the past six months or so, he's been known maybe by anywhere from 40% to 60% of Canadians.
00:04:54.900But because not everyone knows him, I think that the Conservative Party hasn't felt familiar to Canadians for a while.
00:05:00.800Because when you've gone through Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer, you know, Aaron O'Toole, and all the interim leaders over the past five, like eight years,
00:05:08.640it's harder for Canadians to sort of identify with the Conservative Party.
00:05:11.380But with the sort of new vision that the party has of wanting to reduce government and empower individuals and families again,
00:05:17.960I think there is kind of that coalescing of the Conservative base back towards the Conservative Party.
00:05:23.100I don't even think the Conservative Party is necessarily winning that many Liberals over.
00:05:26.360I think they're kind of winning some of those blue Liberals.
00:05:28.500But I think that anyone who wasn't jazzed with the Liberals' programs had already abandoned ship to the Conservatives since 2019.
00:05:35.100But these days, I think it's that there's a lot of people who just got disaffected with Canadian politics and didn't think that there was a big enough difference between the Liberals and Conservatives back in 2015
00:05:44.760that are now coming back because the party's standing up for parental rights, because they're being hawkish on economics,
00:05:51.420and because they actually are proposing to cut spending rather than just sort of doing this silly voodoo of saying,
00:05:58.540we're not going to cut anything, but we'll somehow grow our way out of the overspending,
00:06:02.040which is never a good sign of a party that's supposedly going to be fiscally conservative.
00:06:07.520But I think that once this abacus data poll comes out, I would see Justin Trudeau probably falling below sub-25 in terms of his approval.
00:06:16.500And I think a lot of the discourse around whether or not Justin Trudeau is going to leave or not going to leave
00:06:21.560has really spurred Liberal and NDP voters onto thinking about how much they actually are willing to vote for the party if Justin Trudeau won't leave.
00:06:29.480Because the door has now been opened to the idea that Trudeau could leave, and I think a lot of people are enticed by that idea.
00:06:35.720But I think that with a lot of this stuff around the sea projections, obviously we're still quite a ways out from the 2025 election.
00:06:43.760But with the Liberals having never polled this badly before, I think it's going to stick at this point.
00:06:48.760In the past, even I have thought, okay, the Liberals should surely be done in 2021, no matter how bad a conservative leader as Erin O'Toole is.
00:06:58.540Obviously, Canadians have gotten tired of Justin Trudeau.
00:07:00.980But I think it's because the trend, the sort of like the rot had not quite set in.
00:07:05.240Like you'd see sort of in between 2015 and 2019, there's kind of a slow decline of the Liberals.
00:07:11.060And between 2019 and 2021, it kind of stagnated.
00:07:14.760The momentum kind of fell apart to get rid of the Liberals, mostly because of the pandemic.
00:07:19.600But since 21, I think that what you've seen is that all the negative public policy, the public perception of Justin Trudeau has finally set it.
00:07:27.520And there's a lot of fence-sitters in 2019 and 2021 who were willing to give Justin Trudeau another few years to see if he could figure it out.
00:07:35.280But a lot of those people, I think, have decisively either gone towards the conservatives or are just sending this one out these days, which I'm perfectly happy to see happen.
00:07:44.840But anyways, I think this is all great news for just Canada in general, because I think we really need to get past this Justin Trudeau era.