The Ben Mulroney Show - What is the X-Factor that the Polls might not be accurately capturing?

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Guests and Topics: -What is the X-Factor that the Polls are not accurately capturing? with Guest: Darrell Bricker, CEO Ipsos Public Affairs -Inside the NDP’s struggling campaign as party faces possible collapse with Guest: Tom Parkin, Principal at Impact Strategies and Canadian columnist and commentator If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of your Monday with us. We appreciate your support. We appreciate you joining us as we build the Ben Mulroney Show into the best show that it can be. My dad used to famously say the only poll that matters is the poll on election day, but I can promise you, just because he said that doesn't mean he didn't pay attention to the polls. And it allows you to get a snapshot of where things are today, and it allows political parties to appreciate what's working, what's not working, and pivot accordingly in the hopes of eventually swaying said polls. Well, there's a new poll out from Ipsos that paints a pretty specific picture of where

people's voter intentions are. And to drill down on it, we're joined by Darrell Bricker, the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs. Darrell, welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show. Well, thanks for having me on, Ben. And by the way, I used to work with Alan Gregg. Oh, you did? On your dad's polls.

So I know exactly how much currency he put on them. It was a great line, but he absolutely paid attention to every single poll, but it served him well. Let's talk about this latest poll that I believe was commissioned by Global News from Ipsos. And according to this, I mean, why don't you tell me what it says? Well, we have the liberals ahead by 12. Now, there's been polls that have been in the last, over the course of the weekend, we were out of field on Thursday, that have showed the race tightening up a little bit,

but still, I mean, all of them basically show that if the election was held tomorrow, which is the question that's asked on the polls, that the liberals would be knocking on the door of a majority. So listen, I would not be doing my job if I didn't speak on behalf of the listeners of this show, and I can guarantee you that there are regular listeners

who are screaming at the radio right now with questions for you and I'm gonna do my best to be a vessel for them. Talk to me about the limitations of polling. I mean there are there are a lot of people who support Pierre Poliev who would say this poll doesn't match with what I'm hearing and what what I'm seeing. So talk to me about what polls don't capture or have difficulty capturing. What they tend to have difficulty capturing more recently is people with really emphatic partisan views who don't want to participate in polls. Right.

And I remember that in the first Donald Trump election, his victory, where there were a whole bunch of people who after the fact came out and said, you know, I always intended to vote for Donald Trump election, his victory, where there were a whole bunch of people who after the fact came out and said, you know, I always intended to vote for Donald Trump, but I would never tell anybody that because I didn't want, I didn't want to be harassed by my neighbor, by my friends, by my coworkers. Yeah, so social desirability bias,

and you'll see it in things like referendums in the province of Quebec, you know, the federalist vote tends to be underestimated I saw it in Scotland for example when they had the referendum but I will say you know in 2016 in the US the consensus of polls was that Hillary Clinton was going to win by two percent she did. She actually won the popular vote by two percent the problem was we weren't measuring the right thing which was

was happening in intimate detail in very specific states. And by the way, there was no polling instrument available that would have been able to capture what Donald Trump was able to pull off. But what's happened since then is there's a lot more focus on that and polling in the U.S. than simply looking at what is going on in the national horse race. I'm speaking with Darrell Bricker, the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs.

We're talking about a new poll that was commissioned by Global News that suggests that the liberals have opened up a double digit lead on the conservatives. There are listeners of this show who will say, I'm seeing an enthusiasm for Pierre Pauliev, the likes of which I've never seen. I've heard people who've been on campaigns their whole lives. They said they've never seen this level of enthusiasm. The numbers that he's bringing out to his rallies are blowing away. Anything

that has preceded it, at least on the conservative side, is what do you tell somebody who's listening to you right now and you've done your research and you have your data, and it's far more extensive than anything I could ever do. But how do you counter those who would say there's an enthusiasm for him that can't be squared with the numbers that you're putting out there? No, I would say that they're right. I would say that there is an enthusiasm for Pierre Poliev among the people who are voting conservative, but that's not going to win you an election. That gets you to 30. In fact, the Tories are currently polling above where they performed in any

of the last three elections. We've got them in our, I think in our polling at 36 or 38 or something like that. So they're actually doing better, but it's not enough. And the reason is because the NDP has collapsed. So yes, you can pack an arena, you can pack, I don't know, the Air Canada Center or the, you know, whatever facility you want to go to. You can find people who are going to do that. But it's not a large enough representative group of the actual Canadian electorate. Darrell, I'll tell you the thing that has me scratching my my head is this, I mean 46% is a huge number. They mean they're not and I've seen some polls that have them knocking on the door of 50%. Now the last last politician to get

50% of the vote in Canada was my dad in 1984 and that was when there were three parties and that was when you know his party was didn't have the the baggage of having been in office for 10 years. And he was a known quantity, having been in the House of Commons for almost over a year. And I struggle to understand how a party being led by somebody who three months ago, two thirds of Canadians couldn't even pull out of a lineup and has the added sort of weight of 10 years of a liberal legacy to either defend or explain away. I struggle to see how that number could be so high.

Well, it's basically because people don't know enough about him to dislike him. So it's basically a situation that he's what we're seeing here is a lot of hope over knowledge. So expectations that he's able to do these things based on his pedigree, which they have, you know, all they know is that he seems like a serious guy that knows something about the economy. The point that he made about dragging 10 years of liberal baggage, he seems to be getting a free pass on that at the moment. Now there's three weeks left to go in the campaign and all of this can change overnight. But at the moment, it's about the here and

now. It's about somebody who people perceive as being specially skilled to deal with this particular moment in Canadian history and they're looking for Mark Carney to be that. They see Mark Carney as being that person. The entire liberal campaign rests on the slender shoulders of Mark Carney. And if he stumbles at all, this thing comes crashing down. Darrell, how do you reach out to voters to gain, learn about their intention? Because I remember years ago, and I don't know if it's still the case, that most of the communication was via landline. it's still the case, that most of the communication was via landline. Is that still the case? No.

No. So most polls these days, they tend to be split between online surveys and telephone surveys. The telephone surveys, pardon me, are not landline. They tend to be both landline and cell phone. Okay. And the online ones are people who've agreed to participate in surveys. The best ones, I think, are ones that are a blend of these things, which is what we do.

But all of those methodologies can do a pretty good job of estimating what's going to happen. If you take a look at the last three national elections in Canada, and you go back and you take a look at the average of polls, they're all pretty close. Lastly, before we say goodbye, is I'd love to understand because we talked about the enthusiasm gap a few minutes ago. And voter turnout is everything in an election. And typically younger people don't turn out in the numbers that older Canadians do. But if younger people are are lining up to to go see Pierre polio at his rallies and and it's acknowledged that the people who love him would

Crawl over broken glass for him is there Is that is that sort of thing accounted for in the polling meaning? Are you anticipating a higher than normal? voter turnout for young Canadians? Well, we've seen it before then. I mean, in 2015, young people showed up for Justin Trudeau. It was one of the reasons that he did as well as he did. It was actually quite high voter turnout at that time. I think it was 69%. But so did all the other groups also showed up at higher than normal levels. This time around, I don't know what you're going to see. I think what tends to lead to higher turnout is a sense that there's going to be a change.

So, Poliev has to get this thing closer and he has to make it look like he's actually going to win to get those people who might be really enthusiastic about him but think that the election is going to go the other guy's way, might get them to show up. Oh, by the way, this is why Aaron O'Toole lost. He wasn't able to make people believe that he was actually going to win, so they didn't bother. I gotcha. Hey, Darryl Bricker of Ipsos, thank you very much.

I really appreciate your insights and your expertise, and I hope you come back soon. Thanks a lot, Ben. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show and the chaos that has been Washington and the decisions made by Donald Trump over the past few months are driving markets into the red day after day after day, down over one and a half percent today. There is a talk that Donald Trump is considering a pause on his tariffs for 90 days until they can figure stuff out. I mean, I think that's the closest he would ever come to

admitting that he was wrong. But but we'll have to see because I don't know that this this level of chaos can be sustained for very long. I want to talk for a moment about the NDP because as a conservative I know the arithmetic the I need the conservatives need the NDP to perform at a certain level nationally in order for the conservatives to be successful and form a government and and so so I in this way, I have common cause with my next, my next guest, we're going to talk about the struggles of the NDP campaign thus far, and where it can go from here to improve in

the polls and possibly at the ballot box. So let's welcome to the Ben Mulroney show Tom Parkin, principal impact strategies, Canadian columnist and commentator, Tom, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show, Tom Parkin, Principal Impact Strategies, Canadian columnist and commentator. Tom, welcome to the show. Oh, good to have you. Good to talk. Good morning. So Tom, I'm very curious to get your lay of the land

because as I see it, I don't like looking at the polls every day. I think that that's a fool's errand. However, what I do see is an inability thus far for Jagmeet Singh and the NDP to steal their part of the spotlight. It seems that it's Carney and it's Poliev and there doesn't seem to be enough room right now

for Jagmeet Singh to take the spotlight and get his message out on his view of the country. How do you think the campaign has gone so far? Yeah, they've really struggled against a blue door, red door situation where the and this is I think for most typical NDP traditional voters is a problem of they really loathe Pierre Poliev. So the first thing they want to do with their ballot is not help Poliev in any way and then and then the decision flows from there so if they're in a riding you know that is a liberal riding and the NDP runs a distant third they're probably not gonna fail but they might think about how they use their

ballot. If they're an NDP incumbent riding they'll think about how to use their ballot differently because obviously voting for an NDP incumbent would be a good way of putting, re-electing your incumbent would be a good way of not helping Poliev. But the key to this understanding is that they have to escape this red door, blue door scenario and find another way. Because I think what traditional NDP voters are looking for right now is they do want Carney as prime minister, certainly in preference over Poliev, and that seems to be the only option. But they're also looking for a way to place their vote in a way that keeps the

NDP at the table in the next parliament. And so the challenge the NDP faces, and we're seeing some signs of how they're going to deal with it. The challenge that they face is how to guide voters in key places in their choice so that they place their ballot for the NDP where they can also say, and this is also a strategic vote against Pierre-Paul Yaffe. Yeah, I guess what I'm coming to realize is maybe the best narrative for the NDP would be to suggest, hey, at NDP voters, remember the last parliament where we were able to enact pharmacare and dental care and childcare though that's because you put us in a position where we could influence the

liberal minority government. And the way it's looking now is you're going to get yourself a liberal majority. And we all know that when they're in that position on their own, they don't have us whispering in their ear, you don't get all the things you want. Yeah, I still think that the number one thing is that they want to use their ballots of stuff. Oh, yeah, this is the problem that they that they face and why so many NDP voters have moved, according to polls. And just like, you know, just like

your investment portfolio, don't look at poor polls every morning, especially not this morning. So the, uh, the, the thing about your argument is that it's secondary. Okay. And, and I think most NDP voters already know that they know that in terms of what they want for Canada, things are better when they have a strong NDP. And it's not just a matter of what the liberals will do when the NDP is around there to push them, but also a matter of what the liberals will do when the NDP is not around to push them. Because we've seen that before too.

But Tom, talk to me about tactics here because, talk to me about tactics, Tom, because if they don't want Pierre Poliev to get elected, then they've got to focus their attention on him. But in doing so, if they focus their attention on him, that allows the liberals to come up and sweep to power in a majority. And if they attack Mark Carney in an effort to get their votes back, that gives life to Pierre Poliev,

something that you said is strictly verboten. Yeah, well, I think it's legit for them to raise questions about Carney, the red flags. But I think, again, most, you know, inform new Democrat voters, and I think they by and large are a pretty informed group, get it that that Carney is an investor, that's a banker, that he may not share the same values of the same vision for Canada. They get that. But again, that's a baker that he may not share the same values of the addition program they think they get that but again that the subsidiary point that because of you know that's not the choices of the context they live in so the number one tactical position that the ntp faces is how to communicate to voters

that in this writing in this writing the way to stop your polyethyl protein so we saw a judgment thing on the weekend on vancouver island which is the straight-up well exception of uh... elizabeth may here you know it's a straight-up nbp

uh... conservative territory uh... the liberals run i i i had to say it but i think it's correct to say but the liberals run third in every uh... in everywhere riding there the argument is very clear and sing set a very clear on vancouver island it's you've got a vote in dp to stop

here probably to put your up vote with the liberals you're risking letting uh... you know letting uh... the conservative and in the plaza elsewhere and you're seeking edmonton for example at increase park the one with forty percent the uh... conservatives won with 36%,

the liberals won with, sorry, the conservatives followed with 36%, and the liberals came in at 15. So obviously, if you're kind of a bit misinformed or confused and think, wow, the liberals are leading nationally, so here in Edgerton-Grisbach, I'm gonna vote liberal to stop pure polyadvocacy. You're actually helping here, Polly. Yeah, so it's about being really targeted.

It's going to be a very strong message. It's about being very targeted. And very much echoes of the Ontario election. Yeah, Tom, we know that the NDP can have a high tolerance for, call it, electoral underperforming, in that if you don't win an election, the leader gets a chance to stick around more than once. And that's not necessarily the case for the liberals or the Tories. But I saw pictures recently of Jagmeet Singh in the past week with David Eby of British Columbia, Wab Kanu of Manitoba. Is it too soon to start imagining one of those guys picking up the mantle of a defeated Jagmeet Singh?

Well, Wab Kanu is obviously a very attractive political figure. David Eadie, a little less so, he's in his struggles in BC, got a stronger opposition after him. But there's other people out there as well who are, you know, what's Rachel Notley doing in these days? I'm not sure if she's at a law firm. I think it is too, it's, you know, definitely too early to talk about that we'll see what the result is. I expect that we are looking in that direction about change in the future but uh you know because

after three elections you've taken it as far as you probably can take it by any standard. But I think the key here again is um Sigurd wants to come out of this with a strong position as he can to save the party and to live and fight another day. Interesting parallel, you know, I was looking at the, people may know the writ, which is Eric Grenier's substack and he does a lot of polling and seat projection stuff. The night before the Ontario election, he projected the Ontario NDP would win 13 seats. In fact, the next day it won 27. Yeah. So the seat projection site, and by the way, Canada 338 was similar, same thing, massive

underestimation of NDP seats because what we are going to see is what we see, what we saw in Ontario, which is a vote concentration behind incumbents. Yeah. So we live in an NDP incumbent writing, people are gonna go, okay, I'm gonna vote for that guy or that woman because obviously that's the anti-Poliev choice. But the next writing over whether the NDP is not strong, people may vote some other way, right?

Yeah. A very similar version with a very similar idea. Tom, we're going to have to leave it there. We're going to have to leave it there, but I hope you come back soon because there's a lot of election left to fight. I appreciate it. Want to kick your cooking up a notch? This is the moment you've been waiting for.

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