François Legault’s total dominance: 338 Canada
Philippe J. Fournier: In our latest projection, the CAQ party has more secure seats than the majority threshold. Meanwhile, the PQ continues to disintegrate.
François Legault’s dominance in Quebec’s political landscape has not waned one iota since last winter, according to a new Léger poll published in Le Journal de Montreal last Friday. With just over two-thirds of Quebec voters expressing satisfaction with the CAQ’s handling of the pandemic thus far, Legault remains in a strong position for reelection next year. In fact, if a provincial election had been held in Quebec last week, the CAQ would have won a majority of historic proportions, with about half of the Quebec electorate siding with Legault’s party.
Here are the voting intentions of the poll among decided voters:
The CAQ is only in first place with 46 percent support, a landslide 26-point lead over Quebec Liberals who are in second place. Not only does the CAQ lead its rivals in all Quebec regions outside of the island of Montreal, it also has a 37-point advantage among French-speaking voters. Although the CAQ is second to Quebec solidaire (QS) among the youngest electorate (aged 18-34) by a margin of 7 points, it dominates the demographic group aged 35 and over by 30 points, including a 38 point advantage. among 55-year-old voters. and more.
The past calendar year has not been kind to the Quebec Liberal Party (QLP) and new leader Dominique Anglade. Liberals currently stand in the 20 percent overall, but this figure requires additional context: the QLP has lost an enormous amount of support in French-speaking Quebec since its Jean Charest and Philippe Couillard days, and is now largely dependent on support. of the Anglophone and Allophone communities. in and around Montreal. According to Léger, the QLP only receives the support of 10 percent of French-speaking voters, fourth behind the CAQ, Quebec solidaire and the Parti Québécois. With such support, the QLP wouldn’t even win a handful of seats outside the island of Montreal.
As for the leftist Quebec solidaire (QS), Léger measures his support at 14%, two points below his 2018 result. This is the second in a row poll that puts QS ahead of PQ (albeit by a smaller margin than the survey’s uncertainty). However, sources indicate that recent unpublished internal figures had also shown similar trends. While QS hasn’t increased its support across the province since 2018, it still performs better than QLP or PQ compared to the last provincial elections.
Which brings us to the Parti Québécois. Léger measured PQ at just 12% in the province, and also 12% among voters 55 and older, a demographic that used to dominate the PQ. The PQ also ranks fourth among both young voters and in the Montreal metropolitan region. These are stark numbers for a party that came to power in the National Assembly just eight years ago. PQ’s new leader, Paul Saint-Pierre-Plamondon, is seen as the favorite candidate for prime minister by just 4 percent of those polled, which is equivalent to just a third of PQ’s support.
Finally, a word about the fifth party indicated in the graphic above (in purple): The Conservative Party of Quebec is now voting at 6 percent, a figure significantly higher than in recent months and years. A fringe party since its rebirth in 2009 (which garnered less than 1.5 percent of the vote in 2018), the QCP is now led by right-wing radio host Eric Duhaime. For readers outside of Quebec who may not know Duhaime: he is a former correspondent for Rebel Media, has had a career as a polemicist on air (one of many ideas he expressed on air: Poor people who don’t pay taxes on income shouldn’t have the right to vote, and one’s vote must increase in weight proportionally to one’s income), and has fully embraced Trump-style populism and anti-mask demonstrations across the province (online with the PPC leader, Maxime Bernier, at the federal level). Still, the QCP is not expected to win any seats at this time, but Léger measured his support at 14 percent in the greater Quebec City area – top both the liberals of Quebec and the PQ in the region.
We added this survey to the 338 Electoral Model of Canada Quebec and present this updated projection of Quebec today. Here are the seat projection averages based on the latest numbers:
The CAQ is projected to win an average of 95 of the 125 seats in the National Assembly. Its dominance in the French-speaking region of Quebec is such that it would probably encompass the entire Quebec City region, practically all the suburbs of Montreal (including five of the six districts of Laval Island), and would take all the eastern municipalities, Mauricie, Abitibi and Saguenay. regions.
The probability density of entries in the CAQ ranges from 84 to 106 entries in the 95 percent confidence interval:
In fact, this projection suggests that the CAQ has more “safe” seats (72) than the threshold for a majority in the National Assembly (63).
Although no opposition party performs well on this projection from any empirical point of view, the dominance of the CAQ is the one that hurts the PQ the most. Currently holding nine seats in the National Assembly, the PQ is projected to win an average of two seats in the province, but is projected to lead in a single race (Matane-Matapédia, MNA Pascal Bérubé).
The settlement probability density of the PQ is shown below. As mentioned above, although the projection average for the PQ is two seats, the most likely outcome (with a probability of 51 percent) at the time of writing is a single seat:
As for the Liberals, the arrival of new leader Dominique Anglade has not moved the party needle and the QLP appears to be heading for an even worse defeat next year than in 2018. With historically low numbers among Francophone voters (approximately 80 per percent) of Quebec’s electorate), its 2018 result of 31 seats is currently outside the 95% confidence interval of this projection:
Finally: Quebec solidaire is unlikely to repeat its 2018 performance (10 seats) based on these numbers. As it currently stands, QS would be favored to keep the majority of its seats in Montreal, but constituencies such as Rouyn-Noranda – Témiscamingue Y Jean-Lesage could be out of scope of QS due to CAQ domain. Two other QS seats from 2018, namely Taschereau Y Sherbrooke, could also be at stake:
In these turbulent times, we have observed that the public opinion of a party or party leader can sometimes turn a penny. Before the pandemic reached our borders, who could have foreseen the massive unfavorable figures that polls have recently measured towards Alberta Prime Minister Jason Kenney? Or who could have predicted the sharp rise in Doug Ford’s numbers in the spring of 2020, and his even sharper fall from grace in 2021? François Legault has weathered the worst of the pandemic storm with stratospheric approval figures so far and, a year later, he still crushes the opposition in public approval.
Considering the low popularity and low notoriety of opposition leaders in the National Assembly and the fact that Quebec is among the leaders in vaccination in Canada (at the time of this writing), it is hard to imagine that the CAQ waste your chances of reelection next year, especially if a fifth party gains ground at the expense of the “old” parties. But we’ll see: Quebec voters have shown little loyalty to the party over the past decade.
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