Nanos Research Chief Data Scientist, Nik Nanos, speaks with Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins about the late stages of the federal election campaign.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Michael Higgins: Your daily tracking poll through the election has largely had the Liberals leading the Conservatives in the four-to-seven-point range. How much is that tightening up here in the late going?
Nik Nanos: Well, you know what’s interesting, Michael, is that the Liberals have had as much as a 10 or 11-point advantage over the course of the election, and now, they’re at 44, the Conservatives are around 39, so it’s definitely tighter than it has been.
The thing is, there’s still a significant number of people that are probably waiting till the end of the campaign and the election to make their final decision.
MH: The NDP did edge above 10 per cent support in the wake of the debates, but today you have them back under eight per cent. What’s your read on that?
NN: It looks like at least there was two or three days that were positive for Jagmeet Singh and the New Democrats coming out of the French and the English debates, maybe because of his scrappiness, but now past the holiday weekend, what we’re seeing is the New Democrats down to eight per cent nationally, and actually over the last three days, they’re down almost three percentage points. So bad news for Jagmeet Singh and the New Democrats.
It was interesting. I thought maybe they might be picking up steam, but no luck. It’s kind of like Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. Two steps forward, two steps back for the New Democrats.
MH: The fact that the Liberals and Conservatives combined account for roughly 80 per cent of support, what does that say about how far removed we might be from traditional voting patterns?
NN: About 83 per cent of Canadians would vote for either the two front-running parties. To put this into context, with the Conservatives at around 39 per cent, Stephen Harper won a majority mandate with 39-per cent support. So in any other kind of election, a regular election, if there is such a thing, the Conservatives at 39 would have been would have been a big win.
But the New Democrats are down, the Bloc Quebecois is down, the People’s Party is also down from the last election, and people are flocking to the two front-runners, I think because there’s a sense in this particular election, a lot like the free trade election, that whoever Canadians pick to lead the next government will be really important choice, and that it could have a material impact on the direction of the country.
MH: Is that as simple as boiling it down to the Donald Trump effect? Could there be something longer term developing here?
NN: I think Trump is part of what’s going on. I think the other thing is that we have two very different choices between the front-runners.
We have Mark Carney, who has been grafted on top of an unpopular Liberal Party. The Liberal support is not being driven by the fact that people like the Liberals or like what they’ve seen in the last 10 years. It’s being driven by Mark Carney.
And then you have the Conservatives. Primarily, a lot of the Conservative support is driven by the fact that those voters want change. They want the Liberals out of power, and they see Pierre Poilievre as a vehicle for that.
But what we’re getting to is almost a situation where politics is looking a lot like what we see south of the border, where there are two main parties and then some other parties. Canadians, and in this case voters, being focused on the two front-runners and thinking about who they’d like to form the government.
MH: The fact so many have already voted in record numbers, 7.3 million at advanced polls over the long weekend, what kind of impact does that have on the work of pollsters like yourself, or even the interpretation of poll results moving forward?
NN: The good news is, if people have voted, they’re not going to be changing their mind. That’s for sure. So that’s the good news on this front.
What it creates is a level of uncertainty related to what the voter turnout will be, because it looks like we might break a record, or hit a high that we haven’t seen in terms of voter turnout because of the focus on the on the election right now, and I think that’s good news.
The big question is, is, who does that favour? Traditionally, higher voter turnout favours challengers like the Conservatives. And the other thing is, advanced polling usually favours the Conservatives because traditionally, they have a pretty exceptional “get out the vote” effort when it comes to advanced polls, but we don’t really know.
So that’s what the result likely is, but we don’t really know, because we don’t really have a sense of how motivated Liberal voters are. We do know that Conservatives are highly motivated and highly organized.
So it’ll be interesting to see when the advanced polls are counted, the votes in those advanced polls, whether it favours one party or the other.
MH: Attacks may be getting a bit more pointed now between the leaders. If that intensifies, how might that sway perceptions of the parties, of the leaders being reflected in the polls?
NN: I think for both of the front-running parties, what they have to watch out for is an emerging sense that there’s a problem with their platform. Things don’t add up or they don’t make sense.
So expect both of the front-runners to put pressure and to attack the other’s platform as not workable, not feasible. But to put this into context, it’ll only take just a handful of percentage points from the Liberals to the Conservatives to change the dynamic of the game and what the shape of the next government might be.
The challenge for the Conservatives is that tying the Liberals is not enough. They actually have to have higher voter support than the Liberals, because in the prairie provinces, which is the Conservative heartland, they’re way ahead, like 20, 21 points, and it’s inefficient at converting into seats.
In the last two elections, the Conservatives actually did get more Canadians to vote for them, but it was spread out so inefficiently that the Liberals were able to win more seats and form government.
MH: Is there still a role for the undecided vote?
NN: I don’t know. The thing is, undecided vote is only at around six to seven per cent, not a lot. I think we should watch for the Conservatives, especially, to try to persuade some male voters who are currently voting for the Liberals, to switch back into the Conservative column.
It’s not an unrealistic expectation, because let’s face it, few months back, the Liberals were at 20 per cent, so there are a lot of new voters that weren’t there at the end of last year that are now looking at the Liberals.