Hopefuls trying to look like they’ve got momentum
Conservative leadership race in home stretch
• The Conservative leadership race has entered the home stretch, the field still crowded with contestants but increasingly appearing to be a race between two leading candidates.
Until Tuesday, much of the leadership campaigns’ focus was on building support by signing up new Conservative Party members. But with members who join the party after Tuesday ineligible to vote for party leader — and, in a ranked-ballot race, with down-ballot support from members whose first-choice candidates prove to be alsorans potentially vital to deciding the winner — each campaign will now try to signal however it can that its candidate has momentum.
To that end, the campaigns will point to some metrics that can be publicly confirmed, such as caucus endorsements and fundraising numbers, but also to others more difficult to verify, such as the number of members each campaign claims to have signed up or the results of internal polls.
Maxime Bernier’s campaign, for example, issued a news release Tuesday saying that it had raised a whopping $126,000 at a single Vancouver fundraising event Monday night. In Canadian federal politics, where corporate and union donations are banned and where any one individual may give a maximum of only about $1,200 a year to any one candidate, that’s a significant number.
The most recent fundraising numbers verified by Elections Canada, based on filings from October through December, showed Bernier leading the pack with $586,165, and more than twice the number of individual donations received by his closest rival. Kellie Leitch and Andrew Scheer rounded out the top three, collecting $355,121 and $324,546 respectively. The next round of fundraising data, based on January through March, is expected to be released April 30 and will offer the first verified insight into the fundraising operation of Kevin O’Leary, who joined the race late.
To argue that fundraising success is a reasonable proxy for actual voter support, the Bernier campaign provided its most recent internal polling data to the National Post, which the campaign argued shows Bernier and O’Leary have put some distance between themselves and the pack. The Bernier campaign did a telephone poll on March 21 of 2,709 members of the Conservative Party.
Of those surveyed in the Bernier camp’s internal poll, 25.3 per cent intended to pick Bernier as their first choice and 23 per cent favour O’Leary as first choice on what will be a ranked ballot. After that, the poll showed first-ballot support for Andrew Scheer at 13 per cent, Kellie Leitch at 10.9 per cent, Erin O’Toole at 7.2 per cent and Lisa Raitt at 6 per cent. Every other candidate polled below five per cent.
Meanwhile, though the O’Leary campaign was unwilling to share its internal polling data, a senior adviser for the campaign said it shows O’Leary in the lead, followed by Bernier, Leitch, Scheer and O’Toole or Raitt in fifth spot. This ranking more or less matches public polling data from Mainstreet Research, which has been tracking the race week-to-week.
And the Scheer campaign released to supporters results of its own internal polling in February. According to campaign manager Hamish Marshall, the poll was based on 11,383 responses from party members. It showed Scheer in the lead with 23.1 per cent support, followed by Bernier with 20.7 per cent and O’Leary with 12.5 per cent.
In lieu of internal polling, the Leitch campaign instead offered a claim about its support among new members. “We have sold in excess of 30,000 memberships,” said communications director Michael Diamond. It’s currently impossible to test the veracity of such a claim.
A new leader will be chosen May 27.