Byelections don’t matter. I honestly believe that. I’ve always believed that. As far as I can tell, byelections are some weird real-life application of some subset of quantum theory. When your side does well, byelections matter. When it does badly, they don’t. It all depends on the observer.
(Yes, I know this is not actually quantum theory or what the observer effect is — indulge me.)
For that reason, in general, I try to resist the impulse to say a lot about byelections. They don’t matter! But, gosh, even though they don’t matter, they can still be interesting. And the result last night in Durham, where Conservative Jamil Jivani won with a huge percentage of the vote, sure was interesting. Even if it doesn’t really matter.
Let’s talk about why it doesn’t matter first. Durham is a fairly safe Conservative seat. It’s been Conservative for 20 years, since the 2004 election. It was the home seat for former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole and is exactly the kind of 905 riding Conservatives want to be competitive in and usually are. So the outcome — a safely CPC seat remaining with the CPC — doesn’t really tell us anything, and its significance should not be overblown.
But let’s actually take a look at some of the numbers. Because that is where things get interesting.
While I don’t have much to say about a blue riding remaining blue, it is worth taking a look at the swing. Turnout was low, but those that did turn out broke clearly with those that showed up last time. I know, through direct personal conversations, that some Liberals — not all or even many, but some — have viewed the recent polls, which have shown the Conservatives with a massive and growing lead, with some skepticism. Not necessarily outright rejection. But confusion. And some doubt.
Some of this is probably rooted in simple denial; some is no doubt because there were no major political developments that neatly coincided with the polls turning so nastily against the prime minister last year. But, in any case, the skeptics now have a problem. The results in Durham are basically exactly what the polls had suggested they would be. Indeed, they’re right at the top end of that range — or even higher. The 338Canada polling aggregator had the CPC at 55 per cent. If that had been true, that was going to be a spectacular showing for the Tories, who came away with 46.4 per cent in 2021.
But it wasn’t true. Jivani didn’t get 55 per cent. He got 57 per cent.
So does that matter? Not in the sense of tilting the balance of power in the House. But as a real-world, if limited, validation of what months of polls by different companies have been reporting, yeah, it sure is interesting.
The other thing to note (again because it’s interesting, not because it matters) is what happened to the vote share of the other parties. Opponents of the Conservatives and of Pierre Poilievre believe that he has taken the party on a hard-right turn. There has been speculation, and I have found some of it persuasive, that the party has deliberately settled on a “no enemies to our right” strategy. If that’s the case, then the People’s Party, which performed relatively well in the last federal election, must be squeezed out to ensure that there is only one realistic Conservative option on the ballot.
It’s an interesting theory, and I think I even buy into it to an extent, but the results in Durham do not bear it out. The PPC vote held basically stable — it lost a point, relative to 2021, dropping from roughly 5.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent. It was the Liberal and the NDP vote that tanked, allowing the Conservatives to improve their standing by 11 percentage points. The NDP and Liberals each lost a bit over seven points of their 2021 vote share.
In Durham, the far-right-wing vote didn’t coalesce around the Conservatives. The left-wing vote tanked. And that, my friends, doesn’t fit the narrative of the Conservatives somehow trying to pull the far-right voters who’d moved out of the party’s big tent over to the PPC. The PPC is holding its own. The Tories are on the march through the middle. At least in Durham.
The NDP vote is personally more intriguing to me. I’ve always thought the federal NDP’s confidence-and-supply deal with the Liberals was a bad political choice for the NDP. (We can debate whether it’s been a policy win another time.) The NDP is forced to take at least some of the blame for Liberal errors and, come election time, likely won’t receive much credit for anything the Liberals have gotten right during the span of the agreement. So, yeah, call me a skeptic on that one. This has been exacerbated by NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s poor performance — though “baffling and bizarre” is perhaps a better description than simply “poor.” Every time I see him railing at the Liberals for something he dislikes, while seemingly forgetting that he has a wee bit of a influence, I’m just more confused about just what the heck he thinks he’s accomplishing.
Perhaps I’m not the only one. The NDP’s result in Durham is lousy — not just relative to 2021, but relative to all recent elections. And that has got to be sounding some kind of alarm bell in NDP headquarters or at least it ought to be.
What about at Liberal HQ? I honestly don’t know. I noted above that some in the party seem to be in denial. I don’t think they’re in denial about what’s happening to them — they know they’re in trouble. Their form of denial, it seems to me, is about why it’s happening to them. They get that they are unpopular but seem to think it’s just because mean people are doing the disinformation to them. That they might be responsible for voters souring on them seems an alien concept that they do not, in my experience, enjoy having suggested to them.
And that’s fascinating to me. I write about politics for a living. I have a vested interest in convincing you, my wonderful readers, that all this stuff is complicated and mysterious. But when it comes to the Trudeau Liberals, I actually think what’s happening is pretty simple: they’ve been in power a long time and have accumulated all the usual political baggage that entails. They’re also unusually leader-centric, which is bad when your leader loses his shine, and they seem to have a really hard time differentiating honest criticism from far-right-wing, American-financed Russian-bot attacks.
In simpler terms: their feedback loop is broken, which makes it nearly impossible for them to correct their mistakes and apparently absolutely impossible for them to correct any mistake quickly. It’s hard to fix a problem when your response to someone telling you that you have a problem is to assume they’re just trying to sell you an AR-15 rifle, ban abortion, or warm the planet a few degrees more. Or maybe all those things at once.
The Durham results may not matter, but they are almost certainly another warning indicator for the Liberals, who are running out of time to save themselves, if they aren’t doomed already. And they should find that interesting, if nothing else.
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