Attack-ad blitzkrieg falls short
Latest poll results puts Trudeau ahead of Harper on leadership
The only poll that counts, politicians like to say, is the one on election day. True. Polls have been notoriously unreliable, especially recently, at predicting election outcomes. So what’s the point?
Just this: Polling helps us keep score. It tells us about now.
In this light, the latest opinion survey by Leger Marketing, done last week for The Montreal Gazette and Le Devoir, is instructive. It suggests, for starters, that the totality of the Conservatives’ monomaniacal assault on Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, since the day he became leader on April 14, isn’t working particularly well — at least not for the governing party. It has misfired, perhaps even backfired.
Second, the data tells us that New Democrat and opposition leader Tom Mulcair, for all his recent prosecutorial gravitas in the House of Commons, isn’t connecting beyond Ottawa. He isn’t connecting in English Canada, which one might expect, given his historical base is in Quebec. More curiously, he isn’t connecting in Quebec, either.
Nationally, Leger found, the Liberals have the support of 37 per cent of respondents, compared with 29 per cent for the Conservatives, and just 21 per cent for the NDP. In each case there has been movement since March, the pollster found: The Grits were up seven percentage points, the Conservatives and NDP down two and three points, respectively. In Quebec, Liberal support now stands at 46 per cent, according to Leger, compared with 26 per cent for the NDP, 15 per cent for the Bloc, and eight per cent for the Conservatives.
On Leger’s question of who would make the best prime minister, Trudeau leads, at 27 per cent, compared with 23 per cent for the incumbent, Stephen Harper, and 14 per cent for Mulcair. This was the first Leger survey since April that put Trudeau in first place, on this front. The poll of 1,503 respondents was taken online between June 17 and 19, and has a margin of error of 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
A Canadian Press HarrisDecima survey taken June 13-16 had Trudeau and Harper tied on who would make the best PM, at 31 and 30 per cent, respectively, with Mulcair running a distant third at 15 per cent.
But a majority of respondents, 56 per cent, said they had a “favourable” impression of Trudeau, compared with 39 and 37 per cent for Harper and Mulcair, respectively.
These polls are broadly in line with the recent trend measured by poll aggregator threehundredeight.com. Last September, the aggregator’s average had the Tories at 34 per cent, New Democrats at 31 per cent, and Liberals at 22 per cent. In May the Conservatives stood at 28, the NDP at 23, and the Liberals at 40 — an 18-point rise in nine months. What are we to make of it? Most obviously, the newer data indicates the attack ads launched at Justin Trudeau immediately after he became leader — which included a pair of videos and a print version, intended for Conservative mail-outs, in which he was made to look like a cross between Captain Jack Sparrow and the villain Khan from Star Trek — have not hit home. If anything, Trudeau has added support since the ads were launched.
Attack-ad aficionados will say the messaging has yet to bear fruit, that the spots were intended to create a frame, into which future Trudeau missteps would fit. Well, maybe. Except that Leger’s poll was taken in the midst of a furor over Trudeau’s past paid speaking engagements to charities.
Surely, if the attacks were having their intended effect, some of that would have shown up in this poll?
Say what his opponents may about his policies, Harper’s Achilles heel politically is not bad policy; it is bad faith. This data should cause Conservative strategists to recognize that the PMO is making his position worse, each time it overextends itself in an attack, as it has again this past week, in the matter of the Grace Foundation vs. Trudeau. The data lends new weight to the argument the PM himself needs to bring forward a fresh, positive message, rather than constantly reinforcing the negative.
As for Mulcair, he could be forgiven for tearing out his hair, as he examines these numbers. What more can he do to show his mettle, beyond what he’s done in the past two months? He has hammered the government effectively; he has hammered the Senate effectively.
In a nutshell, it seems Mulcair will have to work harder to show Ontarians, Maritimers and Westerners that he understands and appreciates their aspirations — because he can’t count on holding all those Quebec seats, come what may. He needs a broader national message. That would mean, for a start, a more pragmatic, business-friendly and centrist economic strategy than the NDP leader has ventured to date.