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Geoff Price's avatar

It's hard to fully believe the polls when they show such a difference day to day and across the different polling companies, but they do make it easy to see trends, and those trends show that there has been a BIG shift towards the Liberals from the NDP, and a smaller shift from the Cons to Libs.

From media coverage, and I'll admit I'm a biased Conservative voter from Calgary, it appears to much of the same this time around. There's a tweet going around showing the CBC difference in how they've reported Con vs Lib crime announcements, and it's fairly telling. I'm shocked that Carney hasn't been challenged at all by the MM, they are seemingly in love with him. Again, biased, but it seems like every question Pierre gets is a "gotcha" style question, where Carney gets more softballs. I haven't seen anything outside of The Line mentioning the "Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism", and this seems like such radical policy, especially in the anti-tariff mindset most Canadians find themselves in. And don't get me started on the missed opportunity here for Pierre. Maybe it's being held for the debate?

Carney is also being let off the hook by the MM, and Canadian, for his party selfishly shutting down government for their own need to grasp onto power. If this was the Conservatives who had done this we'd never hear the end of it. It's not even mentioned during this campaign.

Lastly, but related, is the media seems to have galvanized on the opinion that Trump's actions must be met with counter tariffs and force, the "bullies only understand force" argument. They have been happy to cast Doug Ford the superhero and Danielle Smith the traitor, though both just seem to have different strategies of dealing with the tariffs. I'm not arguing in favor of Smith here, but I do think we need to put a little more understanding in the different ways of dealing with the crisis, and not just groupthinking our way into a confrontation with Trump that only seems to serve the Liberal's ambition.

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KRM's avatar

I do believe the polls to the extent that I don't think the pollsters are lying or manipulating data (except possibly Frank Graves whom most aggregators seem to have rightly dropped). Clearly it's not fair or helpful to believe polls when they are in your favour and become a conspiracy level skeptic when they aren't.

However I do think it's possible that there is a certain type of person who is more likely to take polls regardless of their other demographic characteristics, who disproportionately parked their vote with the Conservatives in 2024 and now disproportionately moved Liberal. I'm not one of these people for example. I tend to hang up on pollsters who call my phone, assume text polls are scammers, and once I tried signing up for an online panel out of curiosity and ended up being spammed with so many useless nonsense surveys that I quit after like three days. Is my opposite a key swing demographic? Hard to say.

For the record, I think CPC turnout will add a few points to their column but I doubt it will be enough to overcome a collapse in NDP, Green, and Bloc vote, the former two of which don't even seem to be trying. Those leads in Ontario and Quebec would take a ton of polling error to overcome.

The reality is the Liberals used every lever of power at their disposal and timed this election just right to tilt it in their favour. This is the really concerning part and I'm still processing what that means for our democracy.

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