Why Conservatives lost in 2025 and how they WIN next time!
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Summary
In this video, we analyze the results of the Canadian federal election in 2021 and 2025 from the perspective of where the Conservatives performed best and where they performed worst, and how they can learn from them to win in 2020 and beyond.
Transcript
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Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. I'd assume all of you would agree with the old line that if you fail
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to learn from your past mistakes, you will be doomed to repeat them over and over again. Now,
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if this channel exists to answer a question, I think that question is, how does Canadian politics
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actually work? And what I mean by that is, how do you win a Canadian federal election?
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What motivates voters and how do you motivate them to vote for your party and cross the finish
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line and win the election overall? Now, in today's video, I kind of want to partially answer that
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question by analyzing the 2025 Canadian election results from the frame of how the conservatives
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performed, where they did very well, where they didn't do so well, and how they can change it next
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time so that they actually beat the liberals. I would characterize the 2025 election as not even
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really a Mark Carney liberal victory, as much as the conservative party and Pierre Polyev failed
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to win. You see that the liberals didn't actually do that much better in terms of net seat count
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than they did back in the 2021 federal election. Just look up here for the 2021 results and here
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for the 2025 results. The liberals only gained nine seats, whereas the conservatives gained 24 seats.
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And while there's many embarrassing losses in there for the conservatives, overall, they actually
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staked out a lot of new territory that wasn't assumed to be possible for the conservatives to win
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just a couple of years ago. One fantastic result for the conservatives on election night, but not
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nearly the most shocking, was the riding of Hamilton East Stoney Creek. The now MP elect from that riding,
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Ned Couric, is even pointing out that 338 Canada at one point showed that there was a zero percent chance
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for the conservatives to win the riding. It was a riding where the conservatives typically came in
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second place, but any of the major three parties could conceivably win. What ended up happening here
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was a complete collapse of the NDP, but not in favor of the liberals like we see in other areas
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like downtown Toronto. Here's another great example for the conservatives. In 2021, the conservatives
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lost both Windsor West and Windsor Tecumseh Lakeshore, two ridings where they had actually come in third
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place in 2021, as well as in previous elections. We're going to focus in on the riding of Windsor West,
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as it and many other ridings scattered across Canada tells the story of the changing electoral
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coalition that the conservatives have behind them. Now, Windsor West is not a conservative riding.
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That is something that does not have to be qualified in any way. It hasn't gone conservative
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ever. Windsor West was made up of the two former ridings of Essex East and Essex West,
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and while those ridings had had conservative MPs, we are talking about having conservative MPs in the
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1950s and the 1930s. What Windsor West has a lot in common with other ridings that the poly of
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conservatives won in 2021 was that it is a riding with a low median income and with a high minority
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population. Windsor West is only 54.9% white, and that's based on 2021 statistics, and the median income
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is only $34,000 Canadian. For some additional context, in the year 2021, the median Canadian was
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making $44,000, $10,000 more than people in Windsor West. Who could guess why they didn't vote for the
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Liberals or the New Democrats? It's an economically depressed region of Canada that have been hammered
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by too many regulations and high taxes, and then the Liberals run on a platform purely about the fear
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of Donald Trump in the United States. These people could truly care less. In fact, minority Canadians
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are the least likely to care about fear of the United States because they're also the least likely to be
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watching legacy media. Even though the Liberals did better in 2025 in Toronto than they did back in
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2021, the funny thing is that the Liberals actually still lost seats. Most of their popular vote gains
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came from ridings that they were just never going to lose, and so they just savaged the NDP vote in a
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riding they were already winning by more than 10% in the last election. I think there is no better
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example than Chrystia Freeland's riding of University Rosedale, where in this election she won 63% of the vote,
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the Conservatives got 23%, and the NDP absolutely collapsed, which is why she ended up winning by a
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dictatorship-like number. But then if we jump away from downtown Toronto, we then see the trend reverse,
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with Conservative Roman Baber destroying Yara Sachs for the riding of York Centre. Yara Sachs won this
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riding in 2021 by 10%, and now we have Roman Baber winning it by 12%. What the Conservatives were
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doing so right in ridings like York Centre, Markham Unionville, Richmond Hill were also things that
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they were not doing right in areas of the country like Mississauga and Brampton. So there's a lot of
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great takeaways we can take from York Centre, but then we also look at it as an example of why not do
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that elsewhere too? What the Conservative Party did right in a riding like York Centre, but not in the Brampton
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and Mississauga areas, was taking local issues seriously. In York Centre, 15% of the population
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is Jewish, and a big issue that has risen up over the last couple of years is the problem of rampant
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anti-Semitism. Yara Sachs, although she's a Jewish woman herself, did not take it seriously, and even
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went and shook hands with Mahmoud Abbas in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank. She was
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winking and nodding at the pro-Hamas crowd, and didn't really do anything to stand up to anti-Semitism
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other than very hollow symbolic gestures. Roman Baber and the Conservatives honed in on this issue,
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and there was a mass rout in favor of the Conservatives from the Jewish community. But then
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in Brampton and Mississauga, where there were high tensions because of foreign interference
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and Calistani agitation, Brampton and Mississauga have high Indo-Canadian populations,
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the Conservatives kind of just sat on the fence, and they actually in some cases kind of seem to be
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walking hand in hand with many Calistani community organizers. The thing is, Calistanis are not popular
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in the Sikh community, and they are especially not popular in the Hindu community. Hindu Canadians are the
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second most likely group after Evangelical Christians to vote Conservative, but in the 2025 federal election,
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many of those people sat home, or even in some cases voted PPC, because a Hindu-Canadian candidate,
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Jeff Lawl, had been disqualified from a Conservative nomination in Brampton, and so he decided to,
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in protest, go run for the PPC. You might not like him doing that, but that's kind of politics at the
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end of the day. Somebody feels wronged, and they may come after you for it. Brampton East is an especially
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interesting case study, as the former Conservative Party nomination candidate, Jeff Lawl, ran here as
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the PPC candidate, and he in fact got more votes than the PPC did in this riding in the last election.
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This, in spite of the PPC losing more than 80% of their vote across the country.
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Let me be very clear, this is not a vote split with the PPC. These are a lot of Hindu-Canadians voting for
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the PPC in the riding to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the way the nomination for
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the Conservatives was conducted in this riding. If Jeff Lawl had been allowed in the nomination,
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but just naturally lost because he didn't have enough votes to secure the nomination,
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I guarantee you these people would have not only voted for the Conservatives,
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but potentially volunteered for them. They felt wronged, so not only did most of them not show up,
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if they did, they just voted PPC to demonstrate that the Conservatives could have had those votes.
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If you look at the voting results coming out of Brampton and Mississauga,
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there were around a dozen ridings that were within a couple thousand votes. If everything was just
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handled better on the nomination side of things, the Conservatives could have had several of the
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ridings and in fact been nearly in a minority government position with just this region of
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Canada going a different way. Now let's jump over to a very different part of the country,
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the Maritimes. Here the Conservatives actually outperformed the polls quite well.
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Many pollsters were saying that the Conservatives were going to get absolutely wiped out and the
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Liberals were going to get 65% of the vote, but the Conservatives were able to defend their ridings
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in New Brunswick and even gain one in Newfoundland and Labrador. The big black mark for the Conservatives
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in this region was Nova Scotia. I think the macro reason as to why the Conservatives lost seats like
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South Shore St. Margaret's and Colchester Cumberland in Nova Scotia, but ended up gaining a seat in
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Newfoundland was again the issue of focus. The Conservatives were very focused on the issue of
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fishing and oil and gas in Newfoundland, so they appealed to new voters and they were able to flip
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people from the Liberals to Conservatives or turn out low propensity voters. In Nova Scotia, where the
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population is disproportionately white and older, the Conservatives didn't really have a part of their
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vision that appealed to them, and so the Liberals fear-mongering about Donald Trump ended up winning
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out and the Conservatives were left with only a single riding in Nova Scotia, when in fact it would
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have probably been good soil to be able to win even more seats than they did in 2021. This is also very
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likely the reason why ridings like South Surrey-White Rock and Peterborough-Kowalfa were lost in the
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election. Older white voters didn't show up for the Conservatives like they used to because of the fear
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narratives of the Liberals that the Conservatives were not properly countering. Unfortunately, I think
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the thing that the Conservative Party platform lacked in 2025 was the same thing it lacked in 2015 and 2019.
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It didn't have strong social issue planks, and I think those were the ones that older voters were
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voting along the lines of in this election. The Conservatives usually would win older voters in
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previous elections because the Liberals were so hyper-progressive it turned off a lot of older voters
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who naturally don't really like the new woke orthodoxy. But in this election, Mark Carney and
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the Liberals ran against Donald Trump as their big social issue, and the Conservatives really didn't
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even have one to counter them at all. They could have run on immigration, they could have run on
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parental rights, they could have run on a lot of things that would have gotten a lot of older voters
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to shift back towards the Conservatives, but I think they just stuck to safe fiscal issues that appeal to
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younger people who are financially vulnerable right now, but those ones were not connecting with
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retired people who are disproportionately financially well off or their homeowners.
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You've probably already seen this chart from abacus data that shows the top issue for voters 60 years
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old and older was dealing with Donald Trump with a distant second of reducing the cost of living.
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So the cost of living did matter to these voters, but disproportionately they were motivated by that
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Donald Trump social issue. And this leads to a secondary issue for the Conservative Party.
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They didn't let their local candidates run on issues that mattered to the voters in the local area.
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You needed to get permission to pretty much do anything, whether that was attend an event,
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go speak to a community leader, or even post something on social media. And so they ended up in a
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scenario where they were basically running as a generic Conservative candidate without the ability to speak on
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something that mattered to people who live in their area. I've talked to several Conservative Party
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organizers and candidates who actually won tight swing ridings, and they found one of the most
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effective things for them to do on the ground was just ignore HQ, create their own literature,
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and speak to issues that their constituents cared about, even if it meant going off script. They would
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attend debates even though they were told not to do it, they would go to any events they wanted to,
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because that allowed them to run a truly grassroots campaign. And I think the thing that the Conservatives
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were missing in a lot of areas was the grassroots campaigning that had won elections in the past for
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the Conservatives. And I'm fully aware of the elephant in the room in the 2025 federal election, and that is
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the complete collapse of the Jagmeet Singh NDP and the underperformance of Yves-Francois Blanchet's
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Bloc Québécois. The problem with highlighting those things in this video is that that's not something the
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Conservative Party can control. And what I want to do in this video and future videos is focus on what
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the Conservatives did right, what they did wrong, and how they can win next time. I think if they
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just keep this working class base on their side, they play to this new base, they will be able to
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hold on to a lot of the gains that they got, and the Conservatives then by pivoting more onto social
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issues, they will be able to win back a lot of older white voters who don't really care about the
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affordability issues the way that younger voters do. Naturally, there are older voters who care about
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those things. If you're watching my show, you probably voted for the Conservatives, and you
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probably equally care about fiscal issues as well as social issues. But the Conservative Party not
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emphasizing those issues enough means that people who don't follow politics very closely are going to
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see the Liberals offering something, i.e. let's defend Canada from Donald Trump, and the Conservatives
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kind of saying the same thing but not as strong, and then there's no other unique issue they have on
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social issues that's differentiating themselves. Honestly, if they even ran pro-life, they'd probably
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do better. If they ran for tighter restrictions on immigration, they would do better. If they ran for
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a parental bill of rights, they would do way better. They just need to find something that polarizes
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people in a positive direction. Because on those three issues, you actually have a lot of votes to gain
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by taking a position, even if it's controversial. The thing is, about 30% of women and 25% of men in
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Canada are hardcore pro-life. And the thing is that about 80% of people are somewhat pro-life. So even
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running on a pro-life platform, if it's done smartly, can actually make it so that more people
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will vote for you. Because what are the NDP and the Liberals going to do? Split the we are in favor
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of no restrictions on abortion vote? That's only about half of Canadians, and half of Canadians are
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somewhat pro-life and they want there to be real restrictions. I know I said 80 and now I'm saying 50,
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but I'm talking about more pro-life to less pro-life. It's probably about 50-50 in Canada.
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Yes, there's only 25% of people in Canada who are absolutely pro-life in all cases, but that also
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applies to people who are absolutely pro-choice in all cases. It's an issue that you can win a lot of
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votes on. I'm not saying they have to run on it, but it's an example. Again, immigration. If you ran on
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reducing immigration to 100,000, some might say that's controversial. Maybe that's too much of a
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reduction or maybe it needs to be reduced more. But guess what we're having now? We're having a
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policy debate. A policy debate that Pierre Pauliev and the Conservatives can win on. So I think what
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they need is that HQ needs to be shaken up and they need to bring in people with new ideas and who want
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to stake out what is considered risky territory on issues that the Conservative Party hasn't touched in
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the past. Because if they run the same campaign they ran in this election next election, they could
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actually lose by more. Because if Mark Carney's even somewhat smart on the economy and makes things
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at least appear better than it was under Justin Trudeau, he's going to hold on to a lot of his voters
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as well. And unless Conservatives jar those voters out of their normal voting patterns or their voting
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pattern from 2025 with social issue positions, then I don't think much is going to change or it might even
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get worse. Conservatives will hold on to their working class base that is very much economically hurting,
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but how are they going to get the people who feel economically secure? Even on economic issues,
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you could actually stake out a more controversial position and also win votes by combining a fiscal
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issue and a social issue. Reduce taxes severely. Run on the idea that people should be able to control
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their own destinies and that's why we're going to cut taxes across the board by 25%. You would win a lot
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more votes by doing that. By just saying 15% tax reduction under $50,000, that appeals to people just
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entering the job market who don't have a lot of money or don't have high incomes, but those who
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are on the higher income side look at that and say, what's that to me? That's like basically none of
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the taxes that I'm paying being reduced. Anyway, so that should be it for me today guys on this topic.
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I will be back in a future video to talk more about election strategy and how to win. Not that I am like
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the guru on the issue. I am just a guy, but I'm trying to take this issue from the perspective of
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how to win and how to understand Canadian voters. So anyways, thank you guys for watching. Make sure
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to like this video, subscribe to the channel as well as leave a comment. Really helps us out on the