Conservatives keeps riding high, but support isn’t set in stone: poll

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While Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives continue to endear themselves to voters, new polling suggests Tory supporters are among those most likely to change their minds come election day.

A new National Post-Leger poll shows the Conservative with a 21-point lead over the Liberals — with the Tories gaining two points over the last month for 42 per cent support nationally and Trudeau Liberals losing three points to 26 per cent. The poll was taken April 26 to 28.

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These numbers suggest the Liberal’s recent 2024 budget, tabled April 16, landed with a resounding thud across much of Canada, said Leger vice-president Andrew Enns,

“I wouldn’t have expected that the Liberals necessarily would’ve gone up a lot in the polls, but I didn’t think they’d slip even more,” he said.

“The glass-half-empty perspective would be that the budget missed the mark, while the glass-half-full would be that this budget is going to take a while to penetrate into the opinion and work its way in terms of improving the fortunes of the government,” Enns said.

Jagmeet Singh’s NDP came third for national support with 17 per cent, the Bloc Québécois polled at eight per cent, the Greens at five per cent, and the People’s Party of Canada garnering just two per cent of support from respondents.

But the data suggest that Conservative support isn’t all rock solid, with one in five (18 per cent) reporting they’re either somewhat or very likely to change their mind before the next election.

Forty-two per cent of Conservative voters say they definitely won’t change their vote, compared to 38 per cent of Liberal voters, 24 per cent of those who support the NDP and 28 per cent of BQ supporters.

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Of those who say they’d entertain changing their vote, 30 per cent of Conservative supporters say mistakes by their party leader would be the biggest factor in causing them to switch.

That’s compared to 15 per cent of Liberal voters who responded the same way.

Canada’s next federal election is scheduled for fall 2025.

Despite maintaining his minority mandate after the last election, the Trudeau Liberals hold on power relies entirely on a now two-year-old supply and confidence agreement with the NDP.

The number of people who think Poilievre would make the best prime minister increased three points from last month to 32 per cent, ahead of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau at 16 per cent, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh at 11 per cent and the Green Party’s Elizabeth May at four per cent.

Fourteen per cent said that none of the leaders would make the best PM, while the same number of people said they didn’t know.

Thirty per cent of Liberal voters said they’d change their mind if a different person was leading their party, compared to 13 per cent for Conservative voters.

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The only respondents who said they may change their vote more than Conservative voters were BQ supporters, with 29 per cent saying there’s a chance they might have a change of heart before next fall.

Across all parties, the most popular reason given for changing support was if another party put forth policy positions they agreed with more (30 per cent), followed by things in Canada getting worse (27 per cent), policy by their current party they don’t agree with (26 per cent) and mistakes by their party’s leader (24 per cent).

Interestingly Green Party voters were overwhelmingly more likely to strategically change their vote to prevent the election of a different party — 37 per cent compared to results ranging from 13 to 19 per cent for supporters of other parties.

Enns said that’s almost certainly a side effect of the Conservatives’ surge of support.

“You see that kind of result when you’ve got a party that has taken on a lot of new support in a short while. Mr. Poilievre and the Conservatives over the past 14 to 18 months have certainly gone up in the polls, which means there’s a good percentage of new (Conservative) voters,” he said.

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“You’ve got a bunch of individuals who, two years ago, were probably voting for another party.”

The Postmedia-Leger poll was conducted among 1,610 respondents of voting age. While margins of error can’t be applied to polls conducted via online panels, a comparable probability sample would be +/- 2.44 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

National Post

bpassifiume@postmedia.com

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