Quebec 2022 Election

[DL]

Eric Duhaime has chosen to run in Chauveau in Quebec city region. It was Gerard Deltell's provincial riding. His campaign director will be former Conservative federal minister Josée Verner.  He also has the support of Senator Boisvenu (Charest supporter) and Yves Lévesque former Trois-Rivières mayor and Poilievre supporter.

It has been a quick rise for Duhaime. The party is doing well in fundraising and it has 57,000 members. Duhaime said Chauveau has the most members.

In Quebec City, the PCQ is against the tramway project. It proposes a bridge between Quebec City and Lévis instead of the CAQ tunnel.

Article in English on Duhaime.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-conservative-party-covid-19-eric-duhaime-1.6415046

I suspect that the challenge for PCQ is that all the seats they would target are currently CAQ seats and right now CAQ and Legault are still very popular. In 2018 the CAQ won Chauveau by 25 points! If and when the CAQ and Legault become unpopular there could be an opportunity for the the PCQ to gain protest votes and possibly win seats. But how do they win any CAQ seats in an election that is likely to be a huge CAQ landslide?

[DL]

Its really quite extraordinary how the Parti Quebecois was the a major party in Quebec politics for the last 50 years and was the government as recently as 2014 - and now they are polling in single digits and are likely to be wiped off the map! This is like what happened to the Union Nationale in 1973 when they lost all their seats. 

[DL]

The story of Quebec right now basically seems like a party figured out that if they offered Quebecers nationalism without separatism's baggage, federalists & separatists alike would flock to them & crown them the head of a one-party province.

More that the modern generations were ready to move on from that debate, and had stopped identifying with those labels. So when a party can along that abandoned those labels in a way that clearly left the debate in the past...

And yet at the federal level Quebec is still captive to the old federalist LPC vs separatist BQ. It looked for a while like the NDP could break that mold in Quebec federally but now its back to the same old same old

[DL]

It honestly would be kinda funny if PP of all people is the one to win over these voters through I dunno...leveraging discontent and his identity maybe?

PP may have a French sounding name - but he is anglo through and through. He is from Alberta and speaks OK French as a second language. There are plenty of people with more English sounding names than PP who speak much better French than he does

[DL]

"Compared to the last one CAQ has a little increase and PCQ a little decrease. Léger before showed the PCQ lower than other pollsters. In Quebec City metro CAQ leads PCQ 40% to 25%."

as i expected, this suggests that the PCQ vote will be very very inefficient and unfortunately for them the region where they are strongest, the CAQ is much much stronger. I suspect their range is 0 to 1 seat.

[DL]

Duhaime will probably get coverage, sometimes bad from some outrageous declaration but he'll get attention. He'll be in debates and even if experts criticize him he can get a populist message across. I'm still puzzled if he'll get a bigger share of the non-francophone vote than francophone vote as some poll showed. 

Is it that surprising? Isn't the PCQ the only party that is clearly against Bill 21 and against new restrictions on English?

[DL]

It's also going to be interesting to see how much the PCQ wins in the heavily Greek parts of Laval. Those neighborhoods were among the Montreal area's strongest for the PPC and for the PCQ last election. Even over 20 years ago, the Canadian Alliance put up stronger numbers in the majority Greek polls. Not sure why exactly, but that population is uniquely right-wing.

That is odd, we certainly don't see that in the Greek community in Toronto. If anything people of Greek descent tend to be more NDP leaning - FWIW I had heard that a lot of Greeks came to Toronto in the late 60s/early 70s partly to get away from the fascist dictatorship - and none other than Andreas Papandreou lived in Toronto during that period and taught at York University! 

[DL]

I understand that this may be a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, but how "conservative" is the CAQ? For comparison, let's just take the Conservative Party of Canada, or maybe the UK Conservatives.

Its a good question, one could argue that the supposedly more centre-left Quebec Liberals were much more rightwing when they were last in power than the CAQ has been.

[DL]

In what way is CAQ any different ideologically from Macron's party in France? These days the main thing that sets Les Republicains apart from LREM is that LR is now very socially conservative - not exactly what I associate CAQ with

[DL]

Regarding riding polls, I have said it before and i will say it again. In the era of mobile phones, it is now almost impossible to draw a random sample at the riding level - especially in urban areas. In the recent Ontario election Mainstreet and Forum did a slew of riding polls that were almost uniformly highly, highly, highly inaccurate. For some reason these IVR polls at the riding level always seemed to grossly underestimate the NDP vote. Something similar happened in the federal election last year. For example Mainstreet did a riding poll in Davenport that had the Liberal beating the NDP by 30 points - it ended up being the closest race in Canada with the Liberals winning by 65 votes (0.1%)

[DL]

I think one of the reasons why riding polls these days are so grossly inaccurate is that at the riding level you can only get the phone numbers of people with directory listed landline numbers. Its almost impossible to get cell phone numbers at the riding level. This is very problematic when you have two parties QS and PCQ whose support tends to skew very young. Sure pollsters can weight but the problem is that in a typical IVR poll you might literally have just 1 or 2 respondents out of 400 who are 18-35 and if you try to weight those people up to 25% - you can get some very wild distortions

[DL]

While I agree with your sentiment, younger people are less likely to vote anyway, so they shouldn't be weighted up to 25% in the first place (though, all the pollsters still do this).

There are ways of course to get cell sample at the riding level. It's a bit trickier for urban ridings, but we have our ways

Riding polls obviously need to be taken with a grain of salt, but this is a electoral geography forum! It's interesting to talk about them, still!

Yes for sure sure younger people are less likely to vote than older people - but in a typical riding IVR poll you will have about 70% of the respondents over the age of 65 and about 1% being under 35 - and while its true that 25% of actual voters won't be 18-34 year olds - they also sure as hell won't be just 1% of all voters.

We saw in the Ontario election that Mainstreet's riding polls had one consistent flaw - they almost always grossly underestimated NDP support (not in their province-wide polls just in their riding polls). I think its because their IVR polls only survey elderly people who have directory listed landline numbers.

[DL]

While I agree with your sentiment, younger people are less likely to vote anyway, so they shouldn't be weighted up to 25% in the first place (though, all the pollsters still do this).

There are ways of course to get cell sample at the riding level. It's a bit trickier for urban ridings, but we have our ways

Riding polls obviously need to be taken with a grain of salt, but this is a electoral geography forum! It's interesting to talk about them, still!

Yes for sure sure younger people are less likely to vote than older people - but in a typical riding IVR poll you will have about 70% of the respondents over the age of 65 and about 1% being under 35 - and while its true that 25% of actual voters won't be 18-34 year olds - they also sure as hell won't be just 1% of all voters.

We saw in the Ontario election that Mainstreet's riding polls had one consistent flaw - they almost always grossly underestimated NDP support (not in their province-wide polls just in their riding polls). I think its because their IVR polls only survey elderly people who have directory listed landline numbers.

That's true, but we did riding polling for QS, and if anything we overestimated them, and they are doing very well among young people. But we were able to get many more cases than "1% under 35", because we were able to include cell phones in the data.

My understanding is that it can be possible to include some cell phones in the sample if you are surveying a riding that is all in one "rate centre". So for example if you were doing a poll of Sherbrooke you could get some cell representation. But if you are trying to do a riding poll in Montreal its a different story because there is only a 1 in 25 chance that a cell number is in the riding you want AND that assumes most people even know what riding they live in!

[DL]

As was the case in Ontario, Mainstreet's riding polls were absolutely abysmal. They consistently underestimated QS in ridings where they were in contention and they grossly underestimated the PCQ in ridings where they were in contention. Why does that company even bother riding polls at all when they are so consistently dead wrong. Its bad for their reputation and just gives the public bad information.

[DL]

66% turnout, the same as last time.

Incredible, considering. Hope someone maps the change in turnout as well.

Weird to see QS do so well in the Eastern Townships. I wonder what their base is there?

FWIW when the NDP swept Quebec in 2011 some of its biggest margins were in eastern township places Drummond and Shefford and Ste. Hyacinthe and some of their MPs from there even won again in 2015...

[DL]

I get the feeling that hard core separatists in Quebec (such that they still exist) vote PQ. Quebec Solidaire seems to have de-emphasized separatism and it has never been their core "raison d'etre" the way it is for the PQ and they now just talk about wanting to convene a citizens assembly on the future of Quebec. Also, the PQ wants even more draconian anti-English and anti-immigrant measures than the CAQ does, while QS has opposed Bill 21 - so I think if you are a young progressive anglo QS is a much easier "sell" than the PQ 

[DL]

Well Rene Levesque stayed on as PQ leader despite winning just 7 seats in 1970 and just 6 in 1973 and losing his own seat both times...but needless to Anglade is no Rene Levesque