338 Sunday Update: It's All Noise Until It Isn't

You know you're in trouble when trailing by 10 points is considered good news

The much-awaited (and heavily-teased) Abacus Data federal poll dropped earlier this week, and its content may have brought a rare sigh of relief for Liberal MPs and supporters across the country. Naturally, we won’t know until more polling comes out whether 1) Abacus caught a new trend first, or 2) if it was just a statistical blimp.

(Some readers wrote to me scoffing at these numbers by labelling them “December polls”, akin to when we wondered whether wonky “Summer polls” were the reason for the sudden rise in CPC support back in August. Partisanship is, and remains, very much in the eyes of the beholder.)

---

---

The poll measured national CPC support at 37%, a drop of 5 points since late November (since Abacus previous’ public release). The Liberals climbed to 27%, up four points during the same period. Both variations stand outside of the margin of error (moe) of these polls — I know, internet panels don’t have moe’s per se, as their samples aren’t probabilistic, but it’s still a reasonable point of reference.

---

---

Read all the details in Abacus’ poll report here.

Despite the “narrative flip” this poll seemed to cause, it must be stated that it remains a generally awful poll for the Liberals: Trailing the Conservatives by 8 points in Atlantic Canada, by 9 points in Ontario, by 11 points in British Columbia, and with only 28% of support in Quebec (five points behind the Bloc). If you took a DeLorean, travelled back to one year ago and showed 2022 Liberals this poll, many would wonder what the hell had happened in 2023*.

Yet, this was the best poll for the LPC this fall.

(*To be fair, many 2023-Liberals are wondering the exact same thing.)

---

---

In the past month (see table below), Liberal support had ranged from 22% (Nanos) to 26% (Léger, Nanos), while the Conservatives went as high as 42% (Abacus) and as low as 38% (Research Co.).

---

---

So while these fresh numbers from Abacus do stretch the brackets a tad more for the main parties, they could — just maybe! — be explained as a simple regression to the mean. In an environment where the Liberals stand, for instance, at 25%, we would see the occasional polls that show either 22% or 27%. This is not at all a slight on Abacus' work, which is right up there as among the best in the country, it’s just how it is.

However, the fact that this reversal of trends detected by Abacus came a day after the Nanos Research tracker showed a three-point bump in a single week in favour of the Liberals, it is reasonable to wonder whether some swing voters may have thought twice about whom to support after the projectors were squarely focused on the Official Opposition Leader for much of the past months (details of Nanos’ numbers are not shared here to respect Nanos’ paywall).

---

---

So how did last week’s numbers impact the 338Canada federal projections? Let’s get to this week’s update

---