So wait, am I right in assessing that basically the entirety of the collapse of BC United is because of the name change?
LOL
Someone from BC might know better, but my understanding is that the rebrand just confused a lot of people at first, and that can have an impact in the polls. Let's say around this time last year, if I'm a typical federal Tory/provincial Liberal voter in BC, but I don't follow politics too closely, I might not even know about the BC Liberal rebrand. The polling prompts are NDP (dirty hippies), Green (dirty hippies), BC United (what?), and Conservative. Well if you're a federal Conservative voter and you don't know what BC United is, just by process of elimination, you would pick Conservative. Not to mention BC Conservatives had already made gains in 2020, and I think that confusion alone gave them enough of a polling boost, which subsequently led to more people taking the BC Conservatives more seriously. Again, just spitballing here.
I also wonder if it's just that calling yourself a Conservative is kind of an asset in the current climate. Like people aren't voting for John Rustad, polls show that his unknowns are still very high for a leader in his position, and David Eby still has a better net favourable. Halfway across the country, Doug Ford has become fairly unpopular, yet the PCs still poll in majority territory and actually gained support in a recent byelection in a key swing seat. In theory, neither Ford nor Rustad should be doing as well as they are. But both Ford's party and Rustad's party have "Conservative" in their name, and the CPC hasn't consistently polled this high literally since the party's founding. So it's possible that CPC's polling boost federally is having a "downballot" impact of just making people more favourable to parties that have "conservative" in their name.
