The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 25, 2023


Shockingly Bad Seat Projections For Justin Trudeau and The Liberals

Topics
seat projections for Liberals
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Jagmeet Singh Brian Breguet Erin O'Toole Stephen Harper Pierre Poilievre Andrew Scheer
Canadians Want The Opposite Of Justin Trudeau Charlie Angus Is Garbage (NDP MP Mocks Sheila Lewis' Death)

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

204.82

Word count

1,668

Sentence count

71

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

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.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.280 Polling is looking absolutely supremely bad for Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party these days.
00:00:04.680 I'm actually kind of shocked at how bad it's gotten.
00:00:07.300 Like, obviously, I'm not shocked in the sense that Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party are awful.
00:00:11.480 And they've been, like, you know, making the lives of Canadians far worse since they've been around over the past eight years. 0.99
00:00:16.500 But 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.
00:00:22.240 It almost doesn't matter what they do.
00:00:24.100 They 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.
00:00:37.660 But 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.
00:00:48.940 Like, 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.
00:01:01.440 At 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.
00:01:09.000 So it's kind of a, you know, like they're going to lose whether they make changes or not.
00:01:12.820 It's kind of, it's become a no-win scenario for the Liberals.
00:01:16.080 But 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.
00:01:30.460 And remember, they won 164 seats for their majority, or 184 seats for their majority in 2015.
00:01:37.960 And now the Conservatives could be winning 187 seats.
00:01:41.380 They 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.
00:01:51.660 It's absolutely insane.
00:01:52.980 And this is not just this one seat projection.
00:01:54.940 If 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.
00:02:02.940 And they're polling as high as 10%.
00:02:04.960 And 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.
00:02:15.280 And 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.
00:02:24.120 So 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.
00:02:42.620 They could literally get away with these, like, really, really fringe victories with, like, very few voters.
00:02:48.420 But these days, I think they've fallen so far that they don't have any particular base that likes them.
00:02:54.280 If 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.
00:03:07.660 In 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.
00:03:14.560 But these days, the Conservatives are literally leading with every demographic, men, women, you know, old, young, it doesn't matter.
00:03:21.600 They're especially leading with millennial voters, which has become the biggest section of voters.
00:03:26.960 And, like, right now, the Liberals don't even lead in Quebec or the Maritimes.
00:03:31.560 I think the Maritimes are effectively a statistical tie.
00:03:34.800 And in Quebec, the bloc leads with the Liberals, like, a little bit behind.
00:03:38.480 And 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.
00:03:48.240 But these days, like, the Conservatives could win, you know, 10 seats or so, which is nothing to sneeze at.
00:03:53.520 But with all these polling showing that the Liberals are behind the Conservatives and the Conservatives are actually pressing towards 40%,
00:04:01.340 I don't see Justin Trudeau being able to survive any of this.
00:04:05.140 And 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.
00:04:14.000 At the same time, they've alienated some of their base who have become very much done with how undynamic the party is.
00:04:19.580 That doesn't matter how bad their public policy is.
00:04:21.980 They only double down, in part because they are in a partnership with the NDP.
00:04:25.800 So they have no incentive to moderate because the NDP probably won't let them. 0.96
00:04:29.860 Like, 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. 0.87
00:04:39.920 But I think that one big part of it, too, is that Pierre Polyev is actually having his name recognition skyrocket these days. 0.97
00:04:47.740 Whereas, you know, in the past six months or so, he's been known maybe by anywhere from 40% to 60% of Canadians.
00:04:54.900 But because not everyone knows him, I think that the Conservative Party hasn't felt familiar to Canadians for a while.
00:05:00.800 Because 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,
00:05:08.640 it's harder for Canadians to sort of identify with the Conservative Party.
00:05:11.380 But with the sort of new vision that the party has of wanting to reduce government and empower individuals and families again,
00:05:17.960 I think there is kind of that coalescing of the Conservative base back towards the Conservative Party.
00:05:23.100 I don't even think the Conservative Party is necessarily winning that many Liberals over.
00:05:26.360 I think they're kind of winning some of those blue Liberals.
00:05:28.500 But I think that anyone who wasn't jazzed with the Liberals' programs had already abandoned ship to the Conservatives since 2019.
00:05:35.100 But 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
00:05:44.760 that are now coming back because the party's standing up for parental rights, because they're being hawkish on economics,
00:05:51.420 and because they actually are proposing to cut spending rather than just sort of doing this silly voodoo of saying,
00:05:58.540 we're not going to cut anything, but we'll somehow grow our way out of the overspending,
00:06:02.040 which is never a good sign of a party that's supposedly going to be fiscally conservative.
00:06:07.520 But 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.
00:06:16.500 And I think a lot of the discourse around whether or not Justin Trudeau is going to leave or not going to leave
00:06:21.560 has 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.
00:06:29.480 Because 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.
00:06:35.720 But 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.
00:06:43.760 But with the Liberals having never polled this badly before, I think it's going to stick at this point.
00:06:48.760 In 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.
00:06:58.540 Obviously, Canadians have gotten tired of Justin Trudeau.
00:07:00.980 But I think it's because the trend, the sort of like the rot had not quite set in.
00:07:05.240 Like you'd see sort of in between 2015 and 2019, there's kind of a slow decline of the Liberals.
00:07:11.060 And between 2019 and 2021, it kind of stagnated.
00:07:14.760 The momentum kind of fell apart to get rid of the Liberals, mostly because of the pandemic.
00:07:19.600 But 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.
00:07:27.520 And 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.
00:07:35.280 But 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.
00:07:44.840 But 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.
00:07:51.700 But that should be it for me today.
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00:08:07.300 And I'll see you next time.