Half a year is a long time in politics, but when you’re trailing in the polls it may not feel like it is long enough.
That is where Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government finds itself with six months to go before the autumn election.
And when beyond prime ministers have been in this area before, it normally has not ended well for them.
Since the Second World War, when political public opinion polling first started in Canada, the governing party has trailed in the polls to eight months prior to the following election twice.
On two occasions, that party was reduced to a minority government. On five occasions, it had been defeated. On only two occasions did it secure a majority.
For parties which led in the polls this far out from election day, it is a much different picture: of the 14 such cases since 1945, the party leading has been defeated just 3 times.
That’s a poor historic precedent for Prime Minister Trudeau.
According to the CBC’s Canada Poll Tracker, an aggregation of all publicly available polling data, the Liberals path the Conservatives by a margin of 2.5 percentage points, with 32.7 percent against 35.2 per cent for Andrew Scheer’s party.
Poll Tracker: Conservatives lead over Liberals slips to 3 factors Typically, prime ministers who met defeat at the ballot box trailed at the polls by a margin of 3 points at the six-month mark. Those parties which went on to re-election using a majority government enjoyed a typical lead of 12 points in the mark.
Obviously, much can change in six days prior to an election, let alone six months. Nonetheless, the historical record reveals it is definitely better to be ahead than behind, even this far out.
Exceptions that prove the rule Past prime ministers have overcome wider polling shortages than the one Trudeau faces today. But those were cases that are exceptional.
Ahead of the 1962 election, John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives were behind Lester Pearson’s Liberals by a margin of six points. In the end, Diefenbaker managed to hold on but was shipped back to Ottawa with a shaky minority government that met its end within a year.
In early 1988, Brian Mulroney’s PCs were behind by seven points. However, Mulroney was able to flip the November national election into a referendum on the free trade agreement with the United States, maintaining his party in energy from the process.
At the end of 1967, the Liberals were monitoring the PCs and their newly installed leader, Robert Stanfield, by nine points. It required a change of leadership of their own to get the Liberals to win 1968 under Pierre Trudeau.
Pierre Trudeau barely surpassed the odds again after only 1 term in 1972. He was behind Stanfield going within that fall’s election and arose with a minority government.
That isn’t the only example that has some recognizable (in addition to familial) connections to the current Trudeau government. The Liberals were trailing behind the PCs with a similar margin in the end of 1978, until Joe Clark’s short-lived minority government has been elected in 1979.
There are a few exceptions on the other side of the ledger, too. Louis St-Laurent dropped even though a 17-point lead to 1957 following 22 years of Liberal government, Paul Martin was ahead by 10 points in 2005 until he dropped his lead to the Conservatives within the course of the 2005-06 campaign. And Stephen Harper was narrowly ahead in 2015 at the six-month mark, although that resulted from the resistance vote being split between Trudeau’s Liberals and Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats.
Scheer, Singh on par with predecessors
Both the Conservatives and the NDP are approximately where those parties are inclined to be at this stage of their pre-election period.
At just over 35 per cent nationally, Scheer’s party is about even with where previous Conservative parties under different leaders have stood with six months to go. Excluding the run-up to the 1997 and 2000 elections — if the right was divided between the PCs and the Reform/Canadian Alliance parties — the Conservatives have dropped 34 percent service with six weeks to go before an election.
It’s a level of support that can go either way. Clark’s party was 37 percent at this point before his defeat in 1980, while Diefenbaker’s PCs were at 37 per cent before he was reduced to a minority government in 1962. Stanfield’s celebration had 35 percent support at the mark before he held Pierre Trudeau into some minority in 1972, while Harper’s Conservatives were at 35 percent before he had been re-elected in 2008.
The NDP’s current standing in the polls is very typical for the celebration this far out from voting day. With 15.3 per cent, Jagmeet Singh’s NDP is just marginally below the 16 per cent average the party and its predecessor, the CCF, have managed at this stage in election cycles since 1945. It places Singh right in the center of the bunch of historic NDP performances.
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