The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 12, 2024


Terrible new poll for Eby's NDP but great for BC Conservatives

Topics
poll bias and turnout BC election and voter turnout
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
David Eby John Rustad John Horgan Abbotsford South Surrey Leger Christy Clark Vancouver Point Grey Vancouver Langara Wilkinson Polyev Tons
Trudeau Liberals 3rd place in Quebec as Conservatives lead every province Trudeau has presser freak out over Poilievre's manufacturing policy

Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

193.67

Word count

4,299

Sentence count

234

Harmful content

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A new poll released by Leger has the Tories very excited about their chances in the upcoming election. In this episode, I explain why this poll is actually good news for the Tories, and why we should all be worried about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.400 Details of a new poll for the British Columbia provincial election have just been released,
00:00:05.400 and it should be getting the Conservative Party of BC quite excited,
00:00:09.060 and it should be very concerning to Premier David Eby and his BC NDP.
00:00:14.540 Whenever we look at polls, we always have to take into account who is the pollster.
00:00:19.240 And in this case, although the NDP is still leading by three points,
00:00:23.260 with the NDP here at 42%, the Conservatives at 39%, BC United at a dismal 10%, and the Greens at 8%,
00:00:32.140 this poll was conducted by Leger, and Leger has always historically had a little bit more of a left bias to its results.
00:00:39.660 So, federally, right now, although most pollsters have the Conservatives leading the Liberals by anywhere from 19 to 21 points,
00:00:47.860 when you look at the median polls coming out, Leger, every once in a while, will say that the Liberals are actually only down by 17 points,
00:00:55.440 or 14 points, when all the other pollsters are still saying 20 points.
00:00:59.700 They tend to oversample downtown cores, and they don't get enough people who work more traditionally conservative jobs.
00:01:06.860 A lot of more traditionally conservative jobs are things that don't really allow you to take a poll in the middle of the day,
00:01:12.460 so you get a lot more downtown office workers, people who work in HR, people who work for the government answering polls,
00:01:19.520 and Leger's methodology tends to capture that a lot, where other pollsters try different tactics in order to get at those
00:01:25.940 who are less likely to pick up the phone, even though they're very likely to still show up and vote on Election Day.
00:01:31.840 There is always a response bias to polls. Polls are never perfect, and I can tell you,
00:01:36.440 it's not that Leger's trying to be biased, it's just the way that they do polling tends to have these results.
00:01:41.920 Every pollster has a little bit of a bias this way or that way.
00:01:46.000 But this poll is still excellent for the conservatives, because of Leger saying they're only down three,
00:01:51.500 they're probably tied, or maybe they're leading by one or two when it comes to turnout.
00:01:56.060 Because Leger had released some numbers ahead of the poll coming out, probably about five or six days ago,
00:02:01.500 asking people, what are your emotions going into this provincial election?
00:02:05.100 And 31% of people said apathy, crushing apathy.
00:02:09.260 And when you take into account the fact that the conservatives really weren't a party in the last election in 2020,
00:02:15.540 they only got 2%, I don't think that people choosing the conservatives this election
00:02:19.880 are going to be disproportionately those saying that they're apathetic.
00:02:23.840 In fact, even if you assume all BCU voters are apathetic, and even if all Green Party voters are also apathetic,
00:02:30.840 I guarantee a good third to maybe even half of the NDP's support base is apathetic.
00:02:36.260 So I think the conservatives actually are going to have a really good turnout effort in this election.
00:02:43.360 There's just going to be a lot more people going out for a change vote rather than for a defensive vote on behalf of the NDP.
00:02:51.420 But I want to get into the more detailed statistics here to kind of prove my case of why this poll is so good for the conservatives.
00:02:56.900 But before I get into that, I'm going to say, if you live in British Columbia,
00:03:02.480 the BC NDP has a massive money advantage over the conservatives, 0.98
00:03:06.320 not because they're better at fundraising, but because of stupid provincial fundraising rules 0.95
00:03:10.920 that give 33% of the party spending in the last election back to them in a big check from taxpayers. 0.95
00:03:17.820 And then they also get $1.50, I think a little bit more than that, it might be like $1.56 per vote that they got every single year.
00:03:26.140 So if the NDP had like a million votes, well, they got $1.5 million given to them from the taxpayer every single year.
00:03:33.940 And you only got that 33% money back if you happen to have gotten, I believe, more than 10% in a riding.
00:03:40.860 You got 33% of the money you spent in that riding back.
00:03:43.880 Well, the BC conservatives only had 2%, which means that they basically got no money back,
00:03:49.060 and the money they get per vote is dismally low.
00:03:52.140 I think that nobody should be getting money directly from taxpayers,
00:03:55.260 but the BC NDP has set it up this way while also raging against corporate donors,
00:04:00.760 even though they're forcing taxpayers to become their own corporate donors.
00:04:04.700 So if you live in BC, donate $100 to the Abbotsford South EDA in the description below.
00:04:11.480 We are collecting in money and distributing it out to the ridings that need it so that we can win this election.
00:04:17.800 Everyone in BC should give $100.
00:04:19.400 You get a 75% tax credit, so it only costs you $25 to donate $100.
00:04:24.420 That's my pitch.
00:04:25.440 Please go click on that if you haven't given anything yet, because if you don't donate, we can't win.
00:04:30.680 Anyways, moving on to the polling.
00:04:33.000 And so I want to start off with the, I guess, the approval ratings of the leaders,
00:04:39.100 because I think this is going to be very much a referendum-style election.
00:04:43.140 It's either whether or not you like David Eby and the BC NDP's performance, or you don't.
00:04:48.060 That's why BCU and the Greens have become very irrelevant.
00:04:51.200 Greens might grab one or two seats, but mostly they're going to be a non-factor.
00:04:55.220 BCU is definitely a non-factor.
00:04:57.640 If anything, it's just holding federal liberal votes back from the BC NDP.
00:05:03.040 But right now, David Eby has an approval rating of 44%.
00:05:07.280 He is being able to just benefit from the fact that he's the premier.
00:05:11.080 Not a lot of people know that much about him, so they're willing to think nice things.
00:05:14.960 But he's dropped below 50%, which John Horgan could always easily clench back the day.
00:05:20.160 John Horgan, I believe, at one point had like a 65%, 70% approval rating.
00:05:25.520 Now we have David Eby with only a 44% approval rating.
00:05:30.000 And John Rustad is at 35%, which is not bad considering the fact that a lot of left-wing media has been attacking him left and right,
00:05:37.460 and still not that many people know who he is.
00:05:40.100 And as the poll mentions, he has gone from just 27% approval back in March up to 35%.
00:05:47.240 So that is a great improvement, a 8% jump.
00:05:50.840 And this is the approval ratings over time.
00:05:53.380 So back in January of 2023, David Eby is sitting at a 49% approval rating, which is a little bit due to the fact that he just inherited becoming premier.
00:06:03.380 He never actually ran in a legitimate race.
00:06:06.200 The BC NDP bullied every single other person who tried to run in the BC NDP leadership race out of it because they knew David Eby is a very weak politician.
00:06:15.200 He's a weak, he's not a very charismatic person, so he can't stand up to a well-organized opponent.
00:06:23.900 So they made sure that he just got acclaimed as the leader and the premier.
00:06:26.760 So he's our accidental protester premier.
00:06:29.480 And he started at 49% and slumped down to 44%.
00:06:33.140 He didn't have that much star power to begin with, but now that the gap is only 9% between him and John Rustad,
00:06:39.340 he should be really worried about what people think about him in the next couple of months.
00:06:44.080 Because if any bad news comes out, and there's tons of it, the Mission ER just closed for the third time in two and a half weeks.
00:06:51.460 A lot of people are going to start turning their attention and fire onto David Eby as the culprit behind all the issues.
00:06:57.900 But now I want to jump over to some more specific party polling and then regional polling.
00:07:04.200 So this is the current polling about who's voting for what party in terms of the federal voting intentions.
00:07:10.960 Right now, 88% of federal NDP voters are voting for the BC NDP, which makes sense.
00:07:17.420 13% of federal conservatives, which seems a little bit odd, but I think it's mostly just from the fact a lot of people don't realize the BC conservatives are a real force.
00:07:26.220 A lot of people still think this provincial election is between the NDP and the BC liberals who've changed their names to BC United.
00:07:33.220 And so I think that 13% is still going to bleed over to the conservatives eventually.
00:07:38.380 Then 23% of federal liberals are voting NDP and 10% of Greens.
00:07:43.660 Well, let's jump down to the conservatives.
00:07:46.220 6% of federal NDPers are voting conservative.
00:07:49.320 I don't think that's a mistake.
00:07:50.740 That's not just people being confused.
00:07:52.280 If you're picking conservative on these polls, it's probably because you actually want to vote for them.
00:07:56.480 And David Eby is too radical for even a lot of Jagmeet supporters, especially in the South Asian community.
00:08:01.640 The conservatives are grabbing up 77% of federal conservative voters, 9% of federal liberals, and 1% of Greens.
00:08:10.720 And so this is where this poll, showing the conservatives only down 3%, has a lot of room to still grow.
00:08:17.740 Because the NDP, with this 42% rating, 13% of that is federal conservatives, or at least a sizable amount, or 13% of current federal conservatives are saying they're voting BC NDP.
00:08:30.540 I don't think that's actually going to hold up as people get more serious about who they're going to choose as the race grinds on.
00:08:38.120 Because why would you want Polyev to get rid of the federal carbon tax, but be okay with David Eby keeping the provincial carbon tax, which you don't even get a basic rebate for?
00:08:48.380 It's a tax that just goes into general revenues and they just blow it on nothing but safe supply drugs and woke nonsense.
00:08:54.900 So I think that that 13% isn't going to hold up.
00:08:58.520 So you'll probably see the NDP's voter base shrink, unless they gain voters from somewhere else, probably to around 40% to 39%.
00:09:05.580 And the conservatives are probably going to at least absorb two-thirds of that, maybe some go to BCU, because I don't know, they just don't like John Rustad.
00:09:13.100 He's a perfectly fine guy, I don't really know why anyone would dislike John Rustad.
00:09:17.980 And compared to David Eby, David Eby comes off like a juvenile student union president, somebody who seems more comfortable at a Columbia University occupation than at a business meeting.
00:09:28.560 And John Rustad seems like a real adult, which is probably the best way of marketing it.
00:09:33.400 John Rustad looks like he is David Eby's dad here to take the premier's office back from him because he's been a naughty boy.
00:09:41.880 But I'm going to move on from there.
00:09:43.720 But so right now, the BC NDP is having to rely on a very strange base that is probably more reflective of a lot of people just clicking buttons on the phone and saying, yeah, I'm voting BC NDP this time.
00:09:55.060 It's not because they like the NDP, it's just because they are still in the mindset of it's Wilkinson versus Horgan.
00:10:01.560 And John Horgan was a very blue-collar NDP leader, a blue NDP-er, you could say.
00:10:08.660 And so he was going to suck up a lot of people who work in trades, people who are small business owners, whatnot, simply because they didn't like the more corporate left style of the BC Liberals.
00:10:19.260 Because the BC Liberals used to be a big tent party with a lot of center-right people in it.
00:10:22.960 And under Christy Clark and then Wilkinson and now Falcon, it's just become a full-on normal center-left federal liberal style party.
00:10:32.420 And so a lot of people picked the orange people back in the day, the NDP, because at least they seemed to respect working class people.
00:10:40.440 It was still a left party like the Liberals, but at least they seemed to care about working class people.
00:10:45.580 David Eby is very much not that person.
00:10:47.260 He is a pure downtown Victoria, Vancouver activist, and I think that's going to get him hurt with a lot of these blue voters they still have a very, very slight hold on.
00:10:59.200 Those people are probably going to leave once they realize the dynamics of the race are not what they were back in 2020.
00:11:05.340 Anyways, now here is age demographics.
00:11:08.500 The BC NDP is also having to rely on a lot more older voters, who although are very likely to vote, have shrunk in their percentage of the voter base.
00:11:17.840 These people are also those who probably are not on social media as much.
00:11:21.940 Generally, people who are following political news on places like X and Facebook are going to be in that 40 to probably 55 demographic, maybe 30 to 55.
00:11:32.680 It's kind of that specific demographic who really follows the news.
00:11:35.440 A lot of people who are 65 and over are going to be still watching a lot of mainstream news.
00:11:41.860 And so when the race heats up, I think that's going to like snap people out of normal voting intentions because the mainstream media kind of holds up the BC United as if it's a legitimate force at this point because they are simply the opposition in the current legislature.
00:11:56.520 They have the second most seats.
00:11:57.700 So the media covers every press conference they do.
00:12:00.420 They make Falcon seem like a bigger figure than he really is.
00:12:03.080 And when the race heats up and people start seeing polls come up on screen all the time, they're going to be like, oh, well, I don't like EB, so I guess I'm going to go vote conservative because I didn't realize that the conservatives were a real option this time and not just a party that was like keeping the name alive, which was what was going on before a year and a half ago.
00:12:21.340 Some people just kept the BC conservative name registered.
00:12:24.720 There was a couple EDAs.
00:12:25.800 They ran a few candidates, but it wasn't a real party before a year and a half ago when John Rustad became the leader.
00:12:32.600 So, yes, demographics.
00:12:34.520 The conservatives are mostly doing well with middle class, middle age voters and young voters.
00:12:39.320 And I believe, like this poll is showing, they have been improving quite a bit when it comes to older voters as well.
00:12:45.320 I think that is going to be a trend that's going to continue.
00:12:48.440 And that's the problem for the NDP.
00:12:50.620 Right now, all of they are not doing that well compared to the conservatives with younger and middle age voters.
00:12:56.920 And I think the trend in terms of vote shifting towards conservatives is also going to continue.
00:13:02.980 NDP has mostly been in a holding pattern, but I think it's because they haven't gotten enough attention yet.
00:13:07.880 That's kind of the funny thing.
00:13:08.860 EB doesn't have good name recognition, which in a certain sense has been good for him because the more people know about the guy, the more they just don't really like him.
00:13:17.080 It's not that they hate him.
00:13:18.720 He just doesn't seem like a competent manager of a province.
00:13:21.820 He comes off very much like, again, a student union president, a president of a university, not somebody that you want in charge of resource development in British Columbia or especially drug policy,
00:13:33.360 considering that he is just far too left wing in order to see the issue with fresh eyes, clear eyes.
00:13:39.920 So now here is the regional polling that I think is also showing the conservatives poised to win because the stronghold area for the NDP is Vancouver Island.
00:13:53.060 Vancouver Island does not nearly have as many seats as the rest of B.C. where the conservatives have their stronghold.
00:13:59.880 And then they both kind of meet in the middle for a tough fight in Metro Vancouver.
00:14:03.820 So this is already a big advantage for the conservatives.
00:14:07.260 The place that they do the best in is almost completely locked out for the B.C. NDP.
00:14:12.260 The B.C. NDP would have to gain like five points in rural B.C. in order to beat the conservatives or to make it competitive and rip away a lot of conservative seats.
00:14:22.480 The B.C. conservatives only have to do a little bit better on Vancouver Island, and they can win a lot of seats in North Vancouver.
00:14:28.960 If not outside of Victoria, they're very competitive.
00:14:32.820 It's just that the NDP does so well in Victoria, it makes their Vancouver Island numbers look much better than they really are,
00:14:39.520 when they should almost pull it as Victoria and then the rest of Vancouver Island,
00:14:43.440 because the conservatives could get anywhere from two to four, maybe even five seats.
00:14:48.360 That would be a massive coup for the conservatives if they could get anywhere from three to five,
00:14:53.080 because they're only expecting at the moment one to two.
00:14:55.300 But I think that the polling hasn't quite caught up with them yet.
00:14:59.260 But the NDP is just nowhere close to being at where the conservatives are in the rest of B.C.
00:15:04.900 They're 10 points down where the conservatives are, yes, down further on Vancouver Island than the B.C. NDP are in the rest of B.C.,
00:15:13.660 but the conservatives can still win seats where the B.C. NDP have very hard time winning seats in the rest of Vancouver.
00:15:20.520 Sorry, this is becoming a bit of a tongue twister with me having to continually rename the same regions.
00:15:26.460 But now I want to talk about Metro Vancouver, because this is also supposedly a stronghold for the B.C. NDP.
00:15:32.840 When we think of Vancouver, we think of NDP in terms of political popularity.
00:15:37.540 But when you look at Metro Vancouver, they are only leading the conservatives by six points.
00:15:43.180 The conservatives do not have to beat the NDP in Metro Vancouver in order to win the election.
00:15:48.400 They just have to do pretty well in Metro Vancouver, because a lot more of the seats are in the rest of B.C.
00:15:53.780 than Vancouver Island, like I was saying.
00:15:56.140 So if the B.C. conservatives, and again, this is taking into account the fact that Leger is probably underpolling some conservative voters.
00:16:03.360 The B.C. conservatives only had to be around 41, 40% in Metro Vancouver in order to win enough seats to offset the advantages the NDP have anywhere else.
00:16:14.600 And then they'd probably be able to win a 47, 48, 50-seat majority.
00:16:19.340 Very realistic at this point.
00:16:20.940 Even this poll, based on if you kind of did a simulation of the election multiple times, sometimes the conservatives would win.
00:16:28.580 Even 338 right now is giving the conservatives a 20% chance to win.
00:16:33.440 And again, I would argue the polling has not quite caught up to how popular the B.C. conservatives are on the ground these days.
00:16:40.200 I do a lot of door knocking.
00:16:41.820 Tons of NDP voters.
00:16:43.580 I'm not even having to convince them.
00:16:45.220 They're like, yeah, I voted Horgan.
00:16:46.820 I used to always vote NDP, but I just don't like EB, so I'm probably good at voting Rustad.
00:16:51.560 Unprompted.
00:16:52.340 Me barely even saying anything about why I'm at the door.
00:16:55.060 I'm just saying it's about the B.C. provincial election.
00:16:57.260 I'm with the conservatives.
00:16:57.980 They're like, yeah, I'm probably going to vote conservative because, you know, EB's just not like Horgan.
00:17:01.840 I just don't know what's up with this government.
00:17:03.440 They seem clueless.
00:17:04.800 Great for us.
00:17:06.000 Just great for us that that's just the knee-jerk reaction right now with what's going on.
00:17:10.540 But, yeah, there's not really much else for me to say there.
00:17:15.380 Basically, right now in Metrovan, the NDP is just not nearly strong enough in order to feel comfortable.
00:17:23.060 It's only a couple-point swing in Metrovan that would put the conservatives in front, winning Richmond, eking out some seats in Burnaby.
00:17:32.100 I think that the conservatives, that they can win half of Surrey, we're in business.
00:17:35.640 We're doing really well if we can even win half of Surrey.
00:17:38.340 And most of the polls are not showing that we're winning anything in Surrey at the moment.
00:17:41.620 But, again, I don't think they've caught up yet.
00:17:43.620 We have Vancouver Langara.
00:17:45.040 That's a very good seat.
00:17:45.980 We could even win David Eby's seat.
00:17:48.380 Vancouver Point Grey is historically a more conservative-leaning seat in terms of it voted BC Liberals, which were the more conservative option at the time.
00:17:56.420 Right now, it only shows David Eby winning his seat 75% probability.
00:18:01.960 That's terrible.
00:18:03.080 If anything, we should just make sure we doorknock the entire riding right away and just put him on his heels and force him to rip more resources into his own riding and give up some other ridings around the Vancouver area.
00:18:13.940 Vancouver is just – there are some very suburban areas in Vancouver who are just tired of the drugs and the crime and the taxes, who I think that even if they tell a pollster they're going to vote NDP, the chances that they show up are very slim compared to a conservative voter.
00:18:29.120 So I think conservative turnout could be like 80% of people saying they're voting conservative.
00:18:33.140 80%, 85% of them might show up.
00:18:34.980 Where even if the NDP are a little bit above, if only 65%, 75% of them are going to show up, they lose.
00:18:42.100 That is really what this election is coming down to.
00:18:44.600 It's a referendum.
00:18:45.620 It's a yes or no vote.
00:18:46.800 It's either yes, keep David Eby, or get rid of him.
00:18:50.320 And I think on that question, which is the question that is going to be posed to voters, the BC Conservatives will win that.
00:18:57.860 Is there anything else for me to check here?
00:18:59.520 Well, here's – you can just see what the current polling is looking like here.
00:19:03.160 However, a lot has changed.
00:19:06.080 The BC NDP has mostly been in a holding pattern because most of the movement has been on the Conservative United side of the board.
00:19:13.560 But now that it is becoming this two-horse race, I think a lot more NDP voters who are just parking their vote with them because they're probably going to win anyways, now they get to reconsider.
00:19:24.280 And I think it's the reconsideration where the NDP is going to have a hard time arguing why you should be sticking with them.
00:19:29.980 You can't really tell voters, stick with us, and the current situation is just going to continue.
00:19:35.640 It's a change election.
00:19:37.060 Like, that's all I can kind of say, not to repeat myself too much here.
00:19:40.080 But it's genuinely just a change election.
00:19:43.120 It's not an election where people are going to be, like, more safe supply, more rent control, more this or that.
00:19:49.580 You know, we need more taxes.
00:19:52.080 It's just not an election where anyone's going to run out the door excited to keep David Eby in office. 0.88
00:19:56.920 If David Eby was opposing a Christy Clark government, let's say Christy Clark was somehow still the premier, somehow, or Wilkinson had pulled off an upset in 2020, Eby, with these stupid policies he's running on, maybe could win just because his ideas seem very revolutionary and visionary. 0.99
00:20:15.640 They're stupid ideas, but they're big ideas. 0.98
00:20:17.860 The problem is you can't run on having big ideas when people have seen what the big ideas will do to the province. 1.00
00:20:24.620 They've done horrible things, so you can't run on having a vision when the vision has been tried and it's horrible.
00:20:30.520 But, yeah.
00:20:31.400 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:20:33.700 I don't want to ramble on too much about these polls, but it's looking very good for the Conservatives.
00:20:38.720 I bet once a new Main Street poll is out, the Conservatives are going to be up in those ones.
00:20:44.260 Name recognition, brand recognition is the main goal for the Conservatives at this point.
00:20:48.600 We have a money disadvantage, but if we hit every door, if we start using our money in smart ways, not that we're not already, we are, but if we start kind of placing money in areas where we just need that a little bit, you know, 3-4% more people to recognize that we're the sort of the main party to take on the MVP, then I think we can win this thing.
00:21:07.560 It's effectively, in my mind, a mere matter of marching as long as we have the money.
00:21:12.360 So, again, plug the BC Conservatives.
00:21:15.380 If you live in BC, donate in the description below.
00:21:18.280 There's a link to Abbotsford South.
00:21:20.280 Just donate to Abbotsford South.
00:21:21.780 I'm helping manage Abbotsford South, and we're going to package up money and send it to the ridings that need it, the ridings where it's actually going to be a winnable race.
00:21:30.260 We don't need that much in our area, but it just allows us to target stuff where it needs to go since we're kind of managing the whole Fraser Valley from Abbotsford South being our headquarters.
00:21:40.580 So, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:21:42.740 If you don't live in BC, you can always donate to my personal legal fund, the Give, Send, Go link in the description below.
00:21:48.600 Always, you know, make sure to like, share, subscribe, all that stuff, and give me any other BC-related events or news that you guys want me to cover in the description below or the comment section.
00:22:00.080 I always try and read through it, even if I don't reply to everyone.
00:22:03.280 Sometimes when I have 500 comments, I can't get to everyone, but I usually skim through a lot of the comments to see what the general mood is.
00:22:10.900 But I'll see you guys later.