The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Why Conservatives lost in 2025 and how they WIN next time!

00:00:00.160 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. I'd assume all of you would agree with the old line that if you fail

00:00:06.600 to learn from your past mistakes, you will be doomed to repeat them over and over again. Now,

00:00:12.100 if this channel exists to answer a question, I think that question is, how does Canadian politics

00:00:17.580 actually work? And what I mean by that is, how do you win a Canadian federal election?

00:00:23.160 What motivates voters and how do you motivate them to vote for your party and cross the finish

00:00:27.520 line and win the election overall? Now, in today's video, I kind of want to partially answer that

00:00:33.500 question by analyzing the 2025 Canadian election results from the frame of how the conservatives

00:00:40.020 performed, where they did very well, where they didn't do so well, and how they can change it next

00:00:45.680 time so that they actually beat the liberals. I would characterize the 2025 election as not even

00:00:52.220 really a Mark Carney liberal victory, as much as the conservative party and Pierre Polyev failed

00:00:57.940 to win. You see that the liberals didn't actually do that much better in terms of net seat count

00:01:04.100 than they did back in the 2021 federal election. Just look up here for the 2021 results and here

00:01:11.780 for the 2025 results. The liberals only gained nine seats, whereas the conservatives gained 24 seats.

00:01:19.360 And while there's many embarrassing losses in there for the conservatives, overall, they actually

00:01:24.840 staked out a lot of new territory that wasn't assumed to be possible for the conservatives to win

00:01:30.480 just a couple of years ago. One fantastic result for the conservatives on election night, but not

00:01:36.560 nearly the most shocking, was the riding of Hamilton East Stoney Creek. The now MP elect from that riding,

00:01:44.340 Ned Couric, is even pointing out that 338 Canada at one point showed that there was a zero percent chance

00:01:51.800 for the conservatives to win the riding. It was a riding where the conservatives typically came in

00:01:57.360 second place, but any of the major three parties could conceivably win. What ended up happening here

00:02:04.100 was a complete collapse of the NDP, but not in favor of the liberals like we see in other areas

00:02:10.560 like downtown Toronto. Here's another great example for the conservatives. In 2021, the conservatives

00:02:18.320 lost both Windsor West and Windsor Tecumseh Lakeshore, two ridings where they had actually come in third

00:02:25.980 place in 2021, as well as in previous elections. We're going to focus in on the riding of Windsor West,

00:02:33.880 as it and many other ridings scattered across Canada tells the story of the changing electoral

00:02:40.580 coalition that the conservatives have behind them. Now, Windsor West is not a conservative riding.

00:02:47.240 That is something that does not have to be qualified in any way. It hasn't gone conservative

00:02:52.360 ever. Windsor West was made up of the two former ridings of Essex East and Essex West,

00:02:58.460 and while those ridings had had conservative MPs, we are talking about having conservative MPs in the

00:03:04.860 1950s and the 1930s. What Windsor West has a lot in common with other ridings that the poly of

00:03:12.360 conservatives won in 2021 was that it is a riding with a low median income and with a high minority

00:03:19.780 population. Windsor West is only 54.9% white, and that's based on 2021 statistics, and the median income

00:03:27.600 is only $34,000 Canadian. For some additional context, in the year 2021, the median Canadian was

00:03:36.720 making $44,000, $10,000 more than people in Windsor West. Who could guess why they didn't vote for the

00:03:45.100 Liberals or the New Democrats? It's an economically depressed region of Canada that have been hammered

00:03:50.820 by too many regulations and high taxes, and then the Liberals run on a platform purely about the fear

00:03:57.920 of Donald Trump in the United States. These people could truly care less. In fact, minority Canadians 0.99

00:04:03.480 are the least likely to care about fear of the United States because they're also the least likely to be

00:04:08.920 watching legacy media. Even though the Liberals did better in 2025 in Toronto than they did back in

00:04:16.100 2021, the funny thing is that the Liberals actually still lost seats. Most of their popular vote gains

00:04:22.860 came from ridings that they were just never going to lose, and so they just savaged the NDP vote in a

00:04:28.800 riding they were already winning by more than 10% in the last election. I think there is no better

00:04:34.220 example than Chrystia Freeland's riding of University Rosedale, where in this election she won 63% of the vote,

00:04:41.400 the Conservatives got 23%, and the NDP absolutely collapsed, which is why she ended up winning by a

00:04:48.560 dictatorship-like number. But then if we jump away from downtown Toronto, we then see the trend reverse,

00:04:55.480 with Conservative Roman Baber destroying Yara Sachs for the riding of York Centre. Yara Sachs won this

00:05:02.600 riding in 2021 by 10%, and now we have Roman Baber winning it by 12%. What the Conservatives were

00:05:10.320 doing so right in ridings like York Centre, Markham Unionville, Richmond Hill were also things that

00:05:17.460 they were not doing right in areas of the country like Mississauga and Brampton. So there's a lot of

00:05:23.040 great takeaways we can take from York Centre, but then we also look at it as an example of why not do

00:05:28.660 that elsewhere too? What the Conservative Party did right in a riding like York Centre, but not in the Brampton

00:05:35.060 and Mississauga areas, was taking local issues seriously. In York Centre, 15% of the population

00:05:42.040 is Jewish, and a big issue that has risen up over the last couple of years is the problem of rampant

00:05:48.120 anti-Semitism. Yara Sachs, although she's a Jewish woman herself, did not take it seriously, and even

00:05:54.500 went and shook hands with Mahmoud Abbas in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank. She was

00:06:00.460 winking and nodding at the pro-Hamas crowd, and didn't really do anything to stand up to anti-Semitism

00:06:05.900 other than very hollow symbolic gestures. Roman Baber and the Conservatives honed in on this issue,

00:06:12.300 and there was a mass rout in favor of the Conservatives from the Jewish community. But then

00:06:17.580 in Brampton and Mississauga, where there were high tensions because of foreign interference

00:06:22.240 and Calistani agitation, Brampton and Mississauga have high Indo-Canadian populations,

00:06:27.460 the Conservatives kind of just sat on the fence, and they actually in some cases kind of seem to be

00:06:33.600 walking hand in hand with many Calistani community organizers. The thing is, Calistanis are not popular 1.00

00:06:40.360 in the Sikh community, and they are especially not popular in the Hindu community. Hindu Canadians are the 0.99

00:06:46.700 second most likely group after Evangelical Christians to vote Conservative, but in the 2025 federal election,

00:06:53.400 many of those people sat home, or even in some cases voted PPC, because a Hindu-Canadian candidate,

00:07:00.120 Jeff Lawl, had been disqualified from a Conservative nomination in Brampton, and so he decided to,

00:07:06.040 in protest, go run for the PPC. You might not like him doing that, but that's kind of politics at the

00:07:11.860 end of the day. Somebody feels wronged, and they may come after you for it. Brampton East is an especially

00:07:17.800 interesting case study, as the former Conservative Party nomination candidate, Jeff Lawl, ran here as

00:07:23.560 the PPC candidate, and he in fact got more votes than the PPC did in this riding in the last election.

00:07:30.520 This, in spite of the PPC losing more than 80% of their vote across the country.

00:07:36.920 Let me be very clear, this is not a vote split with the PPC. These are a lot of Hindu-Canadians voting for

00:07:44.200 the PPC in the riding to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the way the nomination for

00:07:49.560 the Conservatives was conducted in this riding. If Jeff Lawl had been allowed in the nomination,

00:07:54.680 but just naturally lost because he didn't have enough votes to secure the nomination,

00:07:59.000 I guarantee you these people would have not only voted for the Conservatives,

00:08:02.680 but potentially volunteered for them. They felt wronged, so not only did most of them not show up,

00:08:08.120 if they did, they just voted PPC to demonstrate that the Conservatives could have had those votes.

00:08:13.480 If you look at the voting results coming out of Brampton and Mississauga,

00:08:17.560 there were around a dozen ridings that were within a couple thousand votes. If everything was just

00:08:23.640 handled better on the nomination side of things, the Conservatives could have had several of the

00:08:28.680 ridings and in fact been nearly in a minority government position with just this region of

00:08:34.120 Canada going a different way. Now let's jump over to a very different part of the country,

00:08:39.560 the Maritimes. Here the Conservatives actually outperformed the polls quite well.

00:08:44.840 Many pollsters were saying that the Conservatives were going to get absolutely wiped out and the

00:08:48.760 Liberals were going to get 65% of the vote, but the Conservatives were able to defend their ridings

00:08:53.720 in New Brunswick and even gain one in Newfoundland and Labrador. The big black mark for the Conservatives

00:08:59.240 in this region was Nova Scotia. I think the macro reason as to why the Conservatives lost seats like

00:09:05.480 South Shore St. Margaret's and Colchester Cumberland in Nova Scotia, but ended up gaining a seat in

00:09:11.080 Newfoundland was again the issue of focus. The Conservatives were very focused on the issue of

00:09:16.920 fishing and oil and gas in Newfoundland, so they appealed to new voters and they were able to flip

00:09:22.120 people from the Liberals to Conservatives or turn out low propensity voters. In Nova Scotia, where the

00:09:28.040 population is disproportionately white and older, the Conservatives didn't really have a part of their

00:09:33.560 vision that appealed to them, and so the Liberals fear-mongering about Donald Trump ended up winning

00:09:38.600 out and the Conservatives were left with only a single riding in Nova Scotia, when in fact it would

00:09:43.800 have probably been good soil to be able to win even more seats than they did in 2021. This is also very

00:09:50.200 likely the reason why ridings like South Surrey-White Rock and Peterborough-Kowalfa were lost in the

00:09:55.960 election. Older white voters didn't show up for the Conservatives like they used to because of the fear

00:10:00.920 narratives of the Liberals that the Conservatives were not properly countering. Unfortunately, I think

00:10:06.440 the thing that the Conservative Party platform lacked in 2025 was the same thing it lacked in 2015 and 2019.

00:10:13.960 It didn't have strong social issue planks, and I think those were the ones that older voters were

00:10:19.640 voting along the lines of in this election. The Conservatives usually would win older voters in

00:10:24.680 previous elections because the Liberals were so hyper-progressive it turned off a lot of older voters

00:10:29.800 who naturally don't really like the new woke orthodoxy. But in this election, Mark Carney and

00:10:35.000 the Liberals ran against Donald Trump as their big social issue, and the Conservatives really didn't

00:10:39.800 even have one to counter them at all. They could have run on immigration, they could have run on 0.97

00:10:45.160 parental rights, they could have run on a lot of things that would have gotten a lot of older voters 0.53

00:10:50.280 to shift back towards the Conservatives, but I think they just stuck to safe fiscal issues that appeal to

00:10:56.760 younger people who are financially vulnerable right now, but those ones were not connecting with

00:11:02.440 retired people who are disproportionately financially well off or their homeowners.

00:11:08.200 You've probably already seen this chart from abacus data that shows the top issue for voters 60 years

00:11:14.200 old and older was dealing with Donald Trump with a distant second of reducing the cost of living.

00:11:20.760 So the cost of living did matter to these voters, but disproportionately they were motivated by that

00:11:26.440 Donald Trump social issue. And this leads to a secondary issue for the Conservative Party.

00:11:32.520 They didn't let their local candidates run on issues that mattered to the voters in the local area.

00:11:38.200 You needed to get permission to pretty much do anything, whether that was attend an event,

00:11:42.840 go speak to a community leader, or even post something on social media. And so they ended up in a

00:11:48.200 scenario where they were basically running as a generic Conservative candidate without the ability to speak on

00:11:54.280 something that mattered to people who live in their area. I've talked to several Conservative Party

00:11:59.640 organizers and candidates who actually won tight swing ridings, and they found one of the most

00:12:04.680 effective things for them to do on the ground was just ignore HQ, create their own literature,

00:12:10.040 and speak to issues that their constituents cared about, even if it meant going off script. They would

00:12:15.080 attend debates even though they were told not to do it, they would go to any events they wanted to,

00:12:19.240 because that allowed them to run a truly grassroots campaign. And I think the thing that the Conservatives

00:12:24.360 were missing in a lot of areas was the grassroots campaigning that had won elections in the past for

00:12:29.960 the Conservatives. And I'm fully aware of the elephant in the room in the 2025 federal election, and that is

00:12:36.760 the complete collapse of the Jagmeet Singh NDP and the underperformance of Yves-Francois Blanchet's

00:12:43.240 Bloc Québécois. The problem with highlighting those things in this video is that that's not something the

00:12:48.760 Conservative Party can control. And what I want to do in this video and future videos is focus on what

00:12:54.760 the Conservatives did right, what they did wrong, and how they can win next time. I think if they

00:12:59.960 just keep this working class base on their side, they play to this new base, they will be able to

00:13:05.240 hold on to a lot of the gains that they got, and the Conservatives then by pivoting more onto social

00:13:10.440 issues, they will be able to win back a lot of older white voters who don't really care about the

00:13:15.560 affordability issues the way that younger voters do. Naturally, there are older voters who care about

00:13:20.600 those things. If you're watching my show, you probably voted for the Conservatives, and you

00:13:24.840 probably equally care about fiscal issues as well as social issues. But the Conservative Party not

00:13:29.880 emphasizing those issues enough means that people who don't follow politics very closely are going to

00:13:34.760 see the Liberals offering something, i.e. let's defend Canada from Donald Trump, and the Conservatives

00:13:40.520 kind of saying the same thing but not as strong, and then there's no other unique issue they have on

00:13:45.560 social issues that's differentiating themselves. Honestly, if they even ran pro-life, they'd probably

00:13:50.840 do better. If they ran for tighter restrictions on immigration, they would do better. If they ran for

00:13:56.760 a parental bill of rights, they would do way better. They just need to find something that polarizes

00:14:02.680 people in a positive direction. Because on those three issues, you actually have a lot of votes to gain

00:14:08.440 by taking a position, even if it's controversial. The thing is, about 30% of women and 25% of men in

00:14:15.320 Canada are hardcore pro-life. And the thing is that about 80% of people are somewhat pro-life. So even

00:14:22.120 running on a pro-life platform, if it's done smartly, can actually make it so that more people

00:14:27.400 will vote for you. Because what are the NDP and the Liberals going to do? Split the we are in favor

00:14:32.360 of no restrictions on abortion vote? That's only about half of Canadians, and half of Canadians are

00:14:37.080 somewhat pro-life and they want there to be real restrictions. I know I said 80 and now I'm saying 50,

00:14:42.200 but I'm talking about more pro-life to less pro-life. It's probably about 50-50 in Canada.

00:14:47.480 Yes, there's only 25% of people in Canada who are absolutely pro-life in all cases, but that also

00:14:53.800 applies to people who are absolutely pro-choice in all cases. It's an issue that you can win a lot of

00:14:58.600 votes on. I'm not saying they have to run on it, but it's an example. Again, immigration. If you ran on 1.00

00:15:04.520 reducing immigration to 100,000, some might say that's controversial. Maybe that's too much of a

00:15:09.560 reduction or maybe it needs to be reduced more. But guess what we're having now? We're having a

00:15:13.560 policy debate. A policy debate that Pierre Pauliev and the Conservatives can win on. So I think what

00:15:19.000 they need is that HQ needs to be shaken up and they need to bring in people with new ideas and who want

00:15:24.600 to stake out what is considered risky territory on issues that the Conservative Party hasn't touched in

00:15:29.960 the past. Because if they run the same campaign they ran in this election next election, they could

00:15:34.760 actually lose by more. Because if Mark Carney's even somewhat smart on the economy and makes things

00:15:39.560 at least appear better than it was under Justin Trudeau, he's going to hold on to a lot of his voters

00:15:44.680 as well. And unless Conservatives jar those voters out of their normal voting patterns or their voting

00:15:50.360 pattern from 2025 with social issue positions, then I don't think much is going to change or it might even

00:15:56.760 get worse. Conservatives will hold on to their working class base that is very much economically hurting,

00:16:02.760 but how are they going to get the people who feel economically secure? Even on economic issues,

00:16:07.800 you could actually stake out a more controversial position and also win votes by combining a fiscal

00:16:13.960 issue and a social issue. Reduce taxes severely. Run on the idea that people should be able to control

00:16:19.480 their own destinies and that's why we're going to cut taxes across the board by 25%. You would win a lot

00:16:25.640 more votes by doing that. By just saying 15% tax reduction under $50,000, that appeals to people just

00:16:32.600 entering the job market who don't have a lot of money or don't have high incomes, but those who

00:16:37.320 are on the higher income side look at that and say, what's that to me? That's like basically none of

00:16:42.040 the taxes that I'm paying being reduced. Anyway, so that should be it for me today guys on this topic.

00:16:48.840 I will be back in a future video to talk more about election strategy and how to win. Not that I am like

00:16:55.480 the guru on the issue. I am just a guy, but I'm trying to take this issue from the perspective of

00:17:01.400 how to win and how to understand Canadian voters. So anyways, thank you guys for watching. Make sure

00:17:06.680 to like this video, subscribe to the channel as well as leave a comment. Really helps us out on the

00:17:11.480 algorithm. See you guys later.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - May 08, 2025

Why Conservatives lost in 2025 and how they WIN next time!

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