For a couple of weeks now I’ve wrestled with what to do about the unique data coming from Frank Graves, one of the country’s most prominent pollsters for decades. Could it be true? Should I just leave it be?
Graves, like all pollsters, is accustomed to the blame-the-messenger criticism that comes when his findings rankle. But lately, and particularly in recent days, the comments have taken on a menacing toxicity, something other pollsters wouldn’t often experience.
The reason: Graves tells me his findings suggest “there is a reasonable chance he” – meaning Pierre Poilievre, and by extension his Conservative Party – “might lose the election now.”
You read that right.
Graves believes that the party that has been riding high, that almost everyone (including him) has been conceding for more than a year would take power in a landslide, isn’t a sure bet any longer. In so doing, the EKOS Research Associates founder has stuck his neck way, way, way out there in the polling universe.
“I’m not saying he is going to lose,” he said. “But it has gotten tight.”
Graves’ daily survey results started to shift noticeably last month, when he had Conservatives 25 points ahead in his polls, and when then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland quit the cabinet and forced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to promise at last to leave. The change below the border three weeks ago – and the message to Canada – accelerated the dynamic in the numbers.
On Wednesday, his latest results had the two parties within three points, 35.7 per cent to 32.7 per cent. That’s minority government, not landslide territory, and Graves asserts “this dramatic and perhaps unprecedented movement” has been fuelled by women, university-educated and middle-class voters.
In his polling, the nearly-two-year, 20-plus-point gap between the Conservatives and governing Liberals rapidly narrowed, day by day in the last month.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is weird,’” Graves told me. “But then I saw it again, and again.”
The shift has endured long enough now to feel reliable to Graves.
“I’m comfortable this is a real break,” he says.
Only last September, he was noting “record lows” in support for the Liberals on the basis of national and federal direction, economic performance, global outlook, national identity and attitudes to immigration.
“Canada has never been more dark and divided,” he wrote at the time, with Poilievre’s Conservatives in a 22-point lead. On Wednesday, his website referred to a “major and straight-line decline” in the Conservative advantage in the last month.
Graves surmises the shift arises from three factors: Trudeau’s overdue finale, a bit of a bump as the Liberal leadership race to succeed him convenes, and Donald Trump’s second coming.
What numbers like these would also suggest is that Poilievre’s performance hasn’t yet risen to the occasion, and perhaps that some of his less committed supporters are more excited by the prime minister’s departure than the president’s return.
Public opinion research is a competitive business, and you don’t easily get one pollster commending another, so it’s not surprising that in exchanges with three of them this week, they were skeptical of any Conservative collapse or Liberal resurgence.
Mainly they’ve thought that it’s much too early to read the country.
When most of the recent polls were taken, the Liberal leadership race hadn’t taken much shape and the Trump tariff plan was notional. How could it be possible, then, for someone to support the Liberals without knowing who would be leading the party in a few weeks? How could people be suddenly responding to Trump when he was elected months ago? And why the surge in Liberal numbers when we won’t know how tangible Trump’s tariff threat is, and what Canada will do about it, for at least a few more days?
The other recent polls continue to suggest the Liberals are trailing the Conservatives anywhere from 14 points (Angus Reid Institute, if Mark Carney is the leader) to 21 points (Abacus Data). A notably shifting poll involves Nanos Research, whose findings have seen the gap narrow in its two most recent published polls, from 24 points on Jan. 17 to 17 points on Jan. 24.
We can debate whether the survey responses to Graves now will mean much by what is expected to be an early May election. But one thing we ought not to debate is that the visceral personal responses to him are yet another terrible symptom of the anonymous bile social media has let loose. Graves has polled on this subject, and Canadians would be fine if this could be stopped by some regulation. I doubt other pollsters or public figures would disagree.
Kirk LaPointe is a Glacier Media columnist with an extensive background in journalism.
