The Decibel - Campaign Call: Debate prep and an inside look at polling

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

With less than two weeks until the federal election, The Decibel is bringing you another edition of Campaign Call, The Globe’s weekly election panel.This week, ahead of the French and English leaders’ debates, feature writer Shannon Proudfoot and chief political writer Campbell Clark will explain why debates still matter and what each leader needs to accomplish during them.In the second half, we’re joined by Nik Nanos, the chief data scientist of Nanos Research, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the polls – in terms of how the data is gathered and how reliable polls are.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Welcome to Campaign Call, our election panel show. We're coming to you a bit earlier this week to talk about the debates. On Wednesday and Thursday, the leaders will face each other in the French and English debates. These are the only two debates in this campaign. And people tune into them. According to the Leaders Debate Commission, which organizes them, viewership in 2021 was over 17 million, and over 20 million in 2019. So here's today's panel. I'm Shannon Proudfoot. I'm a feature writer and columnist in the Globe's Ottawa Bureau. And I'm Campbell Clark and I'm a political columnist in the Globe's Ottawa Bureau. And then later in the show, pollster Nick Nanos joins me.

He's chief data scientist and founder of Nanos Research. He'll explain his most recent survey results, walk through how polling works, and what he makes of the Don't Believe the Polls movement. I'm Manika Raman-Welms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Shannon, Kimbal, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

So let's start by talking about the role of debates in these election campaigns. How important are they? Like especially in terms of actually moving public opinion, what is the potential there? Shannon, let's start with you. Well, I think of them sort of as a microcosm of an election campaign in general in that there's a lot of confirmation bias at work. Whatever people already think of candidates, of parties, we have really presidentialized our elections so they really are embodied in the leader even though people vote for the local candidate. I think it tends to just confirm or crystallize what people

already believe. That's not to say it's not great theatre and I say that in a non-dismissive way. There's something really interesting about seeing these people all on the same stage, you know, litigating their own cases, litigating the case of what they want to do with the country, cross-examining each other. But people's opinions tend to be pretty baked in and they sort of take from it what already aligns with what they think and where they're going with things. You used the word potential and I think that's what we're dealing with here, right? There's a loss aversion problem that comes with debates for political leaders

because it's not necessarily that they're going to move the dials, it's that they could, and they could end up getting knocked out. There could be a big swing. It's happened in really intense elections, like 1988 in particular that the debates swung the public opinion quite far, swung back again. But you know, the Fasse

à Fasse TVA debate, the French debate in 2019 really collapsed Andrew Scheer's vote in Quebec. So they do have an impact. Campbell, you mentioned the debate in the late 80s. For those of us who don't remember that very well, can you just remind us why that was so impactful? Campbell S. Sorry, that was the 1988 free trade election or became the free trade election. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney proposed a free trade agreement with the United States and

the liberals, John Turner, were against it. And the conservatives were winning until the debate when John Turner really went after Brian Mulroney. And then suddenly the liberals were winning until the conservatives when John Turner really went after Brian Maroney and then suddenly the liberals were winning until the conservatives deluged the country with political ads. Campbell, do you think it'd be fair that debates aren't won but they can be lost? Is that a fair way to put it? Yeah, I suppose the guy that wins them usually feels like they won them, but yeah. Sure.

I mean, certainly that is the fear if you're the front runner is that it's yours to lose. Absolutely. So it's like the do no harm principle, I guess, is the hope best you can hope to get out of with it. But I find it interesting though that the callback here, Campbell, is something from the late 80s where, you know, we really remember this this kind of knockout moment. Are debates still relevant today? Because we have so many other points of access to our leaders now, right?

Social media, YouTube, podcasts. So do they still matter in the same way? Yeah, they do. I'm not saying that it's going to move the dials, but you look at the French language debate on Wednesday, and you'll see already the leader of the Bloc Québécois wants it to be postponed because it conflicts with the hockey game and the audience might not be strong. It's like it is really important to Blanchet,

Yves-François Blanchet, the Bloc Québécois leader, that he get a chance to scratch the Teflon on Mark Carney, do something to stop him running away with the election in Quebec. So it's an opportunity that they, especially the leaders of the third and fourth parties, that they rarely get. And this is something of a last chance

to reel him in. And also, you know, for voters, you can get a sense of leaders that you have not seen before. Especially, you know, like, this is an election where the prime minister has been in politics for three months, people don't know him well. I think it's fair to say, especially Quebecers,

who will probably hear him in a French conversation for the first or second time on Wednesday. And to your point about the hockey game too, Campbell, I think there's value in the collective experience of watching a debate. I mean, I think it's probably... Not as much value as the hockey game, apparently. Sure, yeah. Less fun, less beer, maybe, depending on how you roll.

But yeah, to me, there's something to be said for it being maybe not must see TV, that's incredibly nerdy. But if a certain critical mass of Canadians sit down and watch it right before a holiday weekend, when they'll be gathering with family and friends, I think there's real value for just attention being kind of collectively directed, even if all people see is the kind of pre chewed little bits that show up on social media or the packages the next day of five moments you missed. I don't know how informing it is, but it is a form of engagement where people are kind of, they're looking toward the election, they're thinking about it, they're maybe talking about

it with family and friends. That seems like a good thing to me, no matter what. Lauren Henry I want to just ask you a specific question about Pierre Poliev, conservative leader Pierre Poliev, because we've seen him be actually quite enthusiastic about the debates, even pushing for the Tevyea debate that is not happening, but pushing for it quite a bit. But he has been limiting media access during his campaign events just in general. Journalists are not on the bus with him, for example, right? So I guess what should voters make of that discrepancy here, that he's got the enthusiasm

though for this kind of debate? Well, I think he really does enjoy going one-on-one with his opponent, or at least that's an opportunity for him because it's comparative shopping. What he doesn't really enjoy is he wants to get out a message in a press conference and he doesn't want reporters asking him questions that pick holes in the message that he wants to get out there. It's a matter of, like, when he's doing his daily press conferences, the limiting of questions from reporters is trying to control things. In a debate, he's trying to score points against his opponent. There are different things.

S1 05.00 I think that's right. And control seems to be the operative thing here. Like if we're extrapolating from the public mood, the public seems to be digging Mark Carney's kind of adult in the room, calm, bland, not much razzle dazzle. That seems to be working for people. It seems to be providing some sense of reassurance or drawing people in in this moment of peril or the perception of peril. And Poliev, I think, risks that if he turns in sort of kind of the quote unquote best debate performance he can and wipes the floor with Mark Carney. He actually does himself a disservice because he could come off looking really angry, unserious, attack dog. He might technically win and knock himself out in the process. So I think he has kind of a delicate line to walk where obviously he wants to cross-examine

Carney. He wants to cross-examine the record of 10 years of liberal leadership and link Carney to that. But if he goes too hard at it, I think he solidifies his own greatest weakness in the minds of voters. I'm writing about that right now as we speak actually. Oh, there you go. And I watched him on Tout le Monde en Pau, the Radio Canada TV show on Sunday,

and there was a different Pierre Polyev in that. The softer side of Sears. Exactly, there you go. The smiling, congenial, different Pierre Polyev in that. The softer side of Sears. Exactly, there you go. The smiling, congenial, friendly Pierre Polyev and not the attacking Pierre Polyev. And I think it probably did him some good with the audience that was watching that show. They saw somebody that you could have a conversation with.

He was talking with people rather than at them and this was very different. But maybe, maybe he'll be a little concerned that if that guy shows up, he won't get the job done that he needs to do with Mark Carney. You know, he needs to reel him back in a bit because Mark Carney's lead in opinion polls on the question of who makes the best prime minister is pretty daunting right now. And there is not much time left to change that. Okay. So we've touched on what Poliev needs to do here, kind of balancing this softer side of

himself maybe with the more attacked nature that he's more familiar embodying. But let's talk about Mark Carney. What does he need to do in these debates? I mean, you said it, Campbell said it, he's been a politician for three months. He hasn't had a lot of opportunities to kind of build up calluses, learn to reel in less helpful tendencies under duress. I do detect an improvement in the first couple of weeks of both the leadership race and then him becoming prime minister. There were some really, really patronizing interactions he had with reporters when he didn't like the question and he let his hackles get up and he let them have it. That was something he was known for doing

sometimes in press conferences at the Bank of Canada. Like it's a tendency he has. It looks like some people in his team have sort of put him on time out and gotten him off that. For sure they have. But they've clearly, the message has been like, no, no, no, bad, don't do that anymore. But debates can be very adversarial. Poliev is really good at getting under people's skin.

Carney seems to react very strongly to any suggestion that he's unethical or that there's anything less than benevolence behind his move to public policy, which coincidentally is Pierre Poliev's very favorite argument to make these days. So I think Carney's greatest challenge is sort of a mirror image of Poliev's in every way in that it's to not look too angry, to not look too defensive, but from the opposite end of experience. Poliev has been debating for 20 years. Like he still had a baby face physically when he went into the House of Commons.

He has practiced at doing this. Carney's brand new at doing it. So they're coming at it from different ends of the scale, but they sort of have mirror challenges in my mind. And you can see the way Mark Carney speaks in press conferences that he has not practiced the pithy lines in front of the mirror the way Pierre Pauli-Eff has for 20 years.

And when you ask him a question, he'll say, well, three things. And he'll go through those three things. And then when he gets to the third one, he'll say, last point, and then he goes, and I probably should have made this the first point. So that, you know, that's not the debating style you usually want on the stage

when you've got whatever it is, 45 seconds. So that could be a problem for him. Also, and I think this applies in different ways in English and French, but you don't want to appear to be too much of a, how should I put this, a high-handed elitist who has an Oxford degree. That can go off wrong, I think, with the average Canadian in their living room. And, you know, so if he tries to tell people, I know how the world works and I am an economist, you can take that too far. He's got something else that he has to do in the French debate on Wednesday night and it's not just speak French well it's a bit

more about do you understand Quebecers you have a sense of who they are and what is important to them because you know he doesn't face just Poilier in the French debate he faces Blanchet and de Blok who are probably, depending on the poll you read. And that's what Mr. Blanchet wants to get across to people, that he's not somebody who really understands what Quebecers want in their identity. And in the coming crisis and the negotiations with Donald Trump, he won't be out there protecting Quebecers. So he has to have, Carney has to find some way of saying, listen, I do understand Quebecers

to a certain extent. I am not from an alien planet. I am, you know, somebody who gets it a little bit. And that's not so easy when you're under persistent questioning from Yves-François Blanchet, who speaks the language much, much better than you do. Let's quickly touch on the NDP and the Bloc and the Greens if you would like to, because they will be there as well. What does success look like in these debates for each of those leaders?

I think just being part of the conversation would be a win for them. And I don't mean that as glibly as it sounds, although kind of, yes. Look, this has become a two horse race, right? We've seen Jagmeet Singh, the NDP leader, shift his messaging in the last week or so from, I'm running to be prime minister, to, okay, I'm not, but you should vote in some NDP MPs to hold some balance of power to kind of keep the liberals from being an unstoppable juggernaut. That's a very significant pivot for him. We've seen some debate about whether the Greens should even be up there. They meet the sort of very technical kind of somewhat subjective threshold for inclusion in the debate. I think there's an argument to be made that the debate would be better served by having fewer voices

that can be heard more than have a jumble of people yelling at people, yelling at each other on stage. GIGI EINHORN Perhaps a one-on-one between like the two frontrunners or something, Shannon? SHANNON I think that might be, I mean the problem becomes where do you draw the line, right? That seems unnecessarily exclusionary, but five people, two of whom frankly are not functional national parties is a harder case to make. First of all for the Greens, they didn't technically meet the requirements of getting into the debate and that's actually going to be a question that is posed before and after these debates

for some time I think and probably the Deb debates Commission is going to face some serious questions You know before the next election about whether they should continue to exist Yeah, they technically met the requirements like April 1st, but by April 7th They did they didn't have enough candidates to meet the requirements for the NDP and the block They have similar goals which is to show that they are useful Even if they are useful even if they are not government. And that's always the case for the Bloc Québécois, but it's the case earlier in the campaign

for the NDP than it usually is. Okay, just in our last minute here, let's just end with something people can look out for in the debates. What's one thing that you might be watching for when you're watching these debates? I think for me, the key thing is whether Mark Carney can get his message across in a debate in the concise format and not take a blow from the afraid's opponents. I mean, that is, he's the front runner. Everybody needs to pull back points on him.

So the key thing is how concisely can he say things and get them across? You know what, I'm going to cop to the fact that I'm really going to be interested in the human theater. I know that's not substantive, it's not policy, but we have spent the last two years hearing the conservatives and Pierre Poliev really effectively and loudly and ruthlessly prosecute a case against the Liberal government. Justin Trudeau most of all, and I sometimes think Pierre Poliev hears a sad violin solo in his head when he thinks about Justin Trudeau

now, but I will be genuinely interested to see these men on stage across from each other, you know, arguing in real time and presenting their case for the country and see both how they react and what vision they offer everyone else. So I take it neither of you will be watching the Habs game then on Wednesday night. I'll record it and watch it later maybe with a beer. Split screens. There's a solution, there you go.

Campbell, Shannon, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks. A couple of hours after we finished recording, the Leaders Debate Commission, the group that organizes the debates, announced that they're changing the timing of the French debate, so it doesn't conflict with the hockey game.

The French debate will now air at 6pm Eastern on Wednesday. The English debate is at 8pm Eastern on Thursday. You can watch the livestream on the Globe's website. Up next, I'm going to speak with pollster Nick Nanos to get a behind-the-scenes look at how polling works. Nick, thanks so much for being here. Great to join you. So Nick, you're the chief data scientist and founder of Nanos Research and you've been doing daily polling throughout this election campaign. So tell me, what is your research showing you

at this moment? This is kind of just under two weeks until election day. Well, the latest Globe and Mail CTV News tracking that we do every night has the liberals at 44% nationally, the conservatives at 39%, NDP back at 9%, followed by the bloc at six. So still a tight race, not a big gap, actually, between the liberals and the conservatives.

Yeah. And do we know how many people in Canada say that they are still undecided? Not a lot actually. It's much lower than usual. Only about six to seven percent of Canadians say that they're undecided right now. It's usually at around 10 to 15 at this point in the campaign. It shows how engaged Canadians are right now in the election. And so one of the questions you ask people, so you do kind of the broad polling that you

just told us about, but you also poll about who they would prefer as prime minister. I wonder why do you ask that question? Because when voters go to the polls, we're not electing a prime minister, right? We vote for our representatives. But why is that something important to ask? Well, you know, the thing is, is what we do know is that leadership matters, that when people are casting their ballots, they're thinking about a number of things. They're thinking about the parties that they like, they're thinking about platforms, they're

thinking about the local candidates. But leadership has become an increasingly important factor as people are less partisan and loyal to parties. So we asked the preferred prime minister question in order to capture who might have or not have the advantage on that front. And what does your research say? Who do people prefer as prime minister question in order to capture who might have or not have the advantage on that front. And what does your research say? Who do people prefer as prime minister? The latest polling suggests that Mark Carney receives top marks at around 49% of Canadians who would prefer him as prime minister, followed by Pierre Poilie at 33%. One thing we have to

remember, however, is that there is always a bit of an advantage for whoever happens to be Prime Minister. So you might think, hey, that's a massive lead, but the reality is is whoever happens to be Prime Minister usually has a couple extra points in the bag because when people tune into the news they see that person as the current PM. All right, let's actually look at how you gather the data for these polls because I think this is something people wonder about. They don't really know how this happens. So take me through this process. At the very core of the nightly tracking that Nanos does for the Globe and Mail and CTV News is actually random sampling. And this is quite important. So what we do is we randomly

select people nationally every day to participate in the research. We do our random selection through random digit dialing, mostly through cell phone numbers, but also some landline numbers. And we stratify it across the country so we don't have too many people in one part of the country or another, or too many people in cities compared to rural areas. And then what we do is we build a national sample

every night. We do a three night rolling average of 400 voters. And every night is like a mini survey that is representative of Canada. So every night we add a new group of people to the sample and then we drop a group and that's why it's called the rolling average. Okay, so 400 people every night for three nights. So that's 1200 Canadians then over those three nights. You mentioned you call people on cell phones and landlines. Do you also text people or reach them through online surveys? How does that

work? We don't text people and we don't do robo calls. We actually have a call center with live people speaking to other live Canadians. For the nightly tracking that we're doing for CTV and the Globe and Mail, three-quarters of the sample is using live interviewers. One-quarter of the sample are people that we've recruited by telephone randomly, but then we ask them to do the survey online. Okay. So there is something always called margin of error whenever we see these surveys. What is the simplest way really to understand that? Well the first thing that you should know about the margin of error it has very little to do with the

reliability of a survey. Margin of error has to do with the variance of a particular statistic. So why don't we just use an example? Say the conservatives are at 50% support. We'll just use this just for discussion purposes. The conservatives or the liberals are at 50% support. And when we do calculate the margin of error based on the sample, which would be 1200 individuals, the margin of error could be plus or minus 2.7 or 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, which means that

that number could be as high as, why don't we say 53 or as low as 47. The challenge is, and here's your tip of the day, if you want to think about how reliable a survey is, you should look at the questions actually, because the questions are more likely to influence the reliability of a survey compared to the mathematical calculation of the margin of error. So margin of error just basically tells you, okay, so that means that the conservatives are within this percentage and that percentage. Okay. You mentioned the questions.

I'm curious about that. What does that actually tell us about the survey? Well, you know, the thing is, is that the questions and the question order are quite critical. So think of it this way. If you have, you know, the ballot question at the very end and you start asking people other questions about the economy, whatever, different public policy issues, those other issues could influence

how someone might respond to the ballot question, which for the nightly tracking, the ballot question is the most important question. That's why for us, whenever we do our ballot for the nightly tracking, the ballot question is the most important question. That's why for us, whenever we do our ballot question on nightly tracking, it is the very first question. So there's no content ahead of it, like who do you think's winning the election? Who do you like on jobs or who do you like on taxes

or who do you think can best manage the relationship with Donald Trump? And when you say ballot question, that's like who you're gonna vote for essentially, right? Yes, exactly. And the thing is, is that by having it at the beginning, we get what we would call a clean read because there's no content ahead of it. Okay. Just to go back to this margin of error stuff that we talked about, took a little detour from, but the numbers you gave us off the

top, Nick, what is the margin of error on those numbers? Oh, just like the example, 2.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Okay. So if the Liberals are at 45-ish in there, it could be 48, it could be 42, but it's in that range. 100%. All right, so then you've gathered all this data. I guess I wonder, how do you make sure that it's representative of the wider Canadian population? Because you're saying, you know, you talked to about 1,200 people.

So how do we know it actually represents Canada? Well, two ways. For one of the things that we do is we do stratified sampling to make sure that we have the right distribution of respondents in different parts of the country and in different types of communities. The second thing that we do is weighting could be applied, which means if there are too many individuals in one particular age cohort, they could be weighted up or down, which is like a little bit of a statistical adjustment to make sure that we don't have too many from one age cohort compared to another.

And you know, the other thing is we have experience. So, you know, we do the surveys like we could do all this stuff, all this scientific stuff, but the reality is does it capture public opinion or not? And you know, the thing is, does it capture public opinion or not? And you know, the thing is, this might be hard for many Canadians to believe. Our market research and public opinion research industry in Canada actually is world-class and does a pretty good job at capturing how Canadians feel, but also on predicting outcomes. Now, are there some pollsters that sometimes don't do a super good job?

Yeah. But the thing is, in general, the industry actually has a pretty good reputation. The one thing that these polls don't really capture though is seat count, right? Cause you're looking at voter intention, which is essentially the popular vote, but you know, our elections are determined by seat count.

Right? So how does that work? Cause I think that's where people get a little confused too. Well, that's when they get angry, right? Well, think of it this way. The last two federal elections, the conservatives won the popular vote. Like, if you look, they actually, more people voted for the conservative party in the last two

federal elections than the liberals, but the liberals were able to form a government. This is because the liberals won more seats. And this had to do with the distribution of support for the conservatives. The conservatives in the Western provinces, the Liberals won more seats and this had to do with the distribution of support for the Conservatives. The Conservatives in the Western provinces, specifically the Prairies, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have big margins and it's inefficient at converting into seats.

So that's when people get upset. You know, same thing in the US election. They say, well, you know, the US election didn't predict the big Donald Trump win. Well, actually the US election in terms of the popular support, the pollsters did an excellent job once all the votes were counted. But converting that into electoral college votes or converting the popular support into seats is kind of where there's sometimes a bit of a disconnect. So last week, Nick, we saw at a conservative rally in Brampton, Ontario, some supporters

were seen wearing shirts and holding signs that said, do you believe the polls? And now to be clear, of course, the conservative campaign has said they had nothing to do with this. Pierre Poliev has distanced himself from it. But Nick, what do you make of the fact that people are out there saying they don't believe the polls? I don't believe them. I was after an answer. Here's, there's actually an explanation. So think of it this way. We talked about what the conservatives are at, 39%. 39% is usually enough to win an election. 39% is usually enough to form a majority government.

Here's another kicker. 39% is the highest level of support that the conservatives have hit in an election since 2011 when Stephen Harper won a majority government. What does this mean? Say the conservatives go to 41 and the liberals are at 42-41. Pierre Poilier will break the record, a 40-year record for conservative support that hasn't been seen since 1988 under Brian Mulrooney, and he still might not be able to win the election. You could imagine the frustration for the conservatives to be like, look at these events. But this goes back to what we talked about. The conservatives, because they're so far ahead in the prairies, they've actually have to be ahead of the liberals

to win more seats because of the inefficient distribution. So it's really interesting. The proportion of Canadians that are supporting the Conservatives are enough in the old days or in a different scenario or environment to convert into a comfortable majority government. However, what they don't see is the collapse of the NDP. What they don't see is a drop of the Green Party, drop of the Bloc Québécois and a consolidation behind those two parties. So in this new, why don't we call it bizarro world where most people are voting for just two parties? Thirty-nine is not enough to win an election.

And you know, with the liberals at 44, they're benefiting from strategic voting from the NDP. They're voting from the Bloc dropping in the province of Quebec and the liberals being up. So I'd just like to say for those people that are going to the conservative gatherings and saying, look at this stuff, the polls must be wrong. No, the polls are right. Here's the good thing.

They're right. And the polls are right because at 39 percent, it's an exceptionally strong score for the conservatives. It's a historical high. Hmm. So it's because the block and the NDP have dropped support and that support has gone to the Liberals. So they seem to have an incredible amount of support, more than you would expect than at this point in a campaign usually. Yeah, it's very unusual to see parties with 44% support.

It's that consolidation. You know, the other thing that's quite interesting about this particular election, it's the closest thing that we've come to a US election in terms of a two-party race. You know, for the last number of elections, the two front-running parties usually garner somewhere between 65% and 70%, maybe in the low 70s, of all of the votes garnered. In this new world, right, according to the Globe and Mail CTV polling that we just did last night,

83% of Canadians, not 67, not 70, 83% of Canadians are voting for the two front runners. This explains kind of the disconnect that people have, conservatives especially, between seeing these events and the enthusiasm that these events have and how they probably see these events as being kind of more compelling than in the past. They're absolutely right. It's just those other parties have been losing support and they've been drifting towards the liberals.

So Nick, looking ahead, we have debates this week, Wednesday and Thursday evening. What will you be polling for after those debates? Actually, you know what? The debates are important. Another thing that's super important, holidays, holiday weekends, do you know why? Cause people get together, families get together, friends start talking, neighbors

start talking, they get to hang out. Inevitably, the weekend after, the holiday weekend after the debates, people will be obviously talking about important things like family, but after that, they're going to talk about the election. And in my experience, word of mouth is usually one of the most compelling, persuadable things that can change people's minds. So you know what? I'm going to wait for the trend line on the Monday, Tuesday after the long weekend, because

that's probably going to give us a sense not just of what transpired during the debates, but how Canadians are percolating and kind of absorbing and figuring out who they want to lead the country. Nick, this was so interesting. Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to join you. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our associate producer is Azra Souter. Our intern is Olivia Grandy. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.