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More than two-thirds of the Conservative caucus has gotten behind one of the 14 candidates for the party's top job. Most are supporting either Erin O'Toole or Andrew Scheer — and O'Toole has now surpassed Scheer as the favourite of Conservatives in the House of Commons, even luring two of Scheer's former backers to his side.
But polls and other metrics suggest Maxime Bernier or Kevin O'Leary are leading the pack. If either of them wins, they could find themselves at the head of a Conservative caucus that overwhelmingly preferred someone else.
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Kellie Leitch is falling back and Kevin O'Leary is moving forward in their bids to lead the Conservative Party, according to the latest update to the Conservative Leadership Index.
Fellow contenders Andrew Scheer and Erin O'Toole also improved their standings in the index thanks to some key political endorsements.
The index is a composite of four leadership race metrics (endorsements, contributors, fundraising and polls) that has been developed to help gauge the state of the 14-candidate race to replace Stephen Harper as the party's permanent leader.
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With less than two months to go before voting begins for the Conservative Party leadership, Maxime Bernier and Kevin O'Leary are the front-runners, according to an analysis of endorsement, fundraising and polling data.
Bernier narrowly leads O'Leary based on a composite of four metrics (endorsements, fundraising, contributors and polls) that estimates how much support each candidate would likely have on the first ballot if the leadership vote were held today — call it the Conservative Leadership Index.
You can read the rest of this article here.
Kevin O'Leary was not one of the 13 candidates participating in the Conservative Party's leadership debate in Edmonton Tuesday, due to what he called its "bad format."
Those who did participate, struggled to be noticed on the cluttered stage — and with less than three months to go before the ballots are counted, candidates need to get noticed.
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O'Leary's decision to avoid the debate might have been the quintessential front runner's move, but O'Leary is far from being a runaway favourite for the leadership. Maxime Bernier is also widely seen to be in a strong position, while candidates such as Andrew Scheer, Lisa Raitt, Kellie Leitch, Erin O'Toole and Michael Chong are trying to secure second choice support that could keep them in the running.
Calls for the other candidates in the race to step aside are beginning to grow.
But will they be heeded?
To help lay out where things stand at this point in the race, I'm joined again by Conservative insiders Chad Rogers of Crestview Strategy and Tim Powers of Summa Strategies.
You can listen to the podcast here, subscribe to future episodes here, and listen to past episodes here.
The Conservative leadership debates have not featured any of the mythical knockout punches that are supposed to win elections, but the subtle (and not so subtle) manoeuvring that will help decide the outcome has been on full display — most recently during Tuesday night's event in Edmonton.
And that includes Kevin O'Leary's decision to skip it.
Since the first official debate in Saskatoon on Nov. 9, the candidates have been up against each other 11 times. The party will hold one more official debate, and more local events are likely to be organized.
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If Kevin O'Leary does not win the Conservative leadership race in May, polls suggest most Canadians will have just one question after someone else is announced as the party's next leader.
Who?
Abacus Data recently polled Canadians on their views of some of the leading candidates for the party's top job. It found that a majority of Canadians either had no strong opinion or no opinion at all about Maxime Bernier, Lisa Raitt, Kellie Leitch and Andrew Scheer.
You can read the rest of this article here.
With 14 candidates in the running, more than a year of campaigning and over a dozen debates to be held before the votes are finally counted on May 27, the Conservative leadership campaign poses unique challenges to journalists.
How do we balance coverage when there are so many candidates vying for attention? Which events are the pivotal ones in the race? And how do we gauge how the actual decision makers — expected to be no more than 150,000 Conservative party members that are eligible to vote — plan to cast their ballots?
The CBC's Catherine Cullen, who has been covering the leadership race since its beginning, joins me to discuss these challenges and what she is hearing and seeing behind the scenes on the campaign trail.
You can listen to the podcast here, subscribe to future episodes here, and listen to past episodes here.
Maxime Bernier's donor base remains the broadest and deepest among the contestants for the Conservative Party leadership, according to an analysis of fundraising data from the fourth quarter of 2016 — before Kevin O'Leary threw his hat into the ring.
But while the data provides no clue of O'Leary's impact, it does suggest that none of the other candidates have the diversified regional backing needed to win a vote that will give equal weight to each part of the country.
You can read the rest of the article here.
Conservative leadership contestants turned on Kevin O'Leary in a testy debate on the West Island of Montreal, questioning his conservatism and claiming the businessman and television personality has no plan to back up his rhetoric.
But O'Leary, participating in his second debate after attending one in Halifax earlier this month, did not strike back at his rivals, focusing instead on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the need to grow the Conservative Party base.
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The Conservative leadership race will be decided by a preferential ballot, so the candidate with the broadest support and widest acceptability stands the best chance of winning. An analysis of fundraising data in the campaign suggests Maxime Bernier shares the most contributors with other candidates, giving him a potentially decisive edge.
But Bernier's advantage might have been disrupted by the entry of Kevin O'Leary into the race in January.
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Kevin O'Leary is the favourite for the Conservative leadership, says one poll. Only he can defeat Justin Trudeau, says another. A majority of Canadians aren't familiar with most of the 14 contestants in the running, according to a third.
But do these polls tell us much about who will actually win the Conservative leadership race?
You can listen to the podcast here, subscribe to future episodes here, and listen to past episodes here.
While most leadership race polling takes all Canadians or supporters of a party as its sample, in the end the only people who will cast a ballot in the upcoming Conservative and NDP leadership votes are party members.
A small and dwindling portion of the population, members are difficult for pollsters to find — so the potential for pollsters to gauge a leadership race correctly is limited.
And it isn't much easier for those in the midst of a leadership campaign.
To discuss the challenges of polling a leadership race, as well as the role of the media in reporting on these polls, I'm joined by Paul Adams, associate professor of journalism at Carleton University and David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data.
You can listen to the podcast here, subscribe to future episodes here, and listen to past episodes here.
The Liberal Party raised the most money from contributors in the fourth quarter of 2016, though the funds raised by both the Conservative Party and the candidates vying for that party's leadership combined for more donor dollars, according to data published Tuesday by Elections Canada.
And among those Conservative leadership candidates, Maxime Bernier topped the list for the second consecutive quarter, increasing his total money raised to over $1 million.
You can read the rest of this article here.
Can a candidate for the Conservative leadership win the party's top job and become prime minister without speaking French well enough to order a plate of poutine in a brasserie?
Kevin O'Leary hopes so — and the poor performances in Tuesday's French-language debate suggest a few of his leadership rivals do, too.
Bilingualism isn't a requirement to win either office. But demographics, the electoral map and the party's history in Quebec suggest it is an enormous, and potentially decisive, advantage.
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The Conservative leadership campaign was shaken up on Wednesday when businessman and reality television personality Kevin O'Leary finally joined the race — just in time to miss Tuesday's French-language debate.
What impact will his candidacy have on a campaign in which none of the 13 other contestants have taken the mantle of the front runner?
You can listen to the podcast here, subscribe to future episodes here, and listen to past episodes here.
O'Leary faces many challenges. Name recognition, however, is not one of them — unlike some of his rivals. But O'Leary speaks little French and has just two months to sign up new members, while some of the other contestants, such as Maxime Bernier and Kellie Leitch, have already been at it for the better part of a year.
His lack of French was the reason he opted out of joining the campaign before the French-language debate. But apart from demonstrating the questionable linguistic skills of some of the contestants who participated, did the debate change the dynamics of the campaign in Quebec and outside of it?
To explain the significance of O'Leary's entry into the race, Conservative insiders Tim Powers of Summa Strategies and Chad Rogers of Crestview Strategy are back on this week's episode of the Pollcast.
You can listen to the podcast here, subscribe to future episodes here, and listen to past episodes here.
The third debate of the Conservative leadership campaign held in Quebec City on Tuesday, the only official debate to be held entirely in French, featured some sharp exchanges between candidates, with much of the fire being directed at Quebec MP Maxime Bernier.
The debate also proved to be a serious challenge to the French-language skills of some of the 13 contestants taking part.
The crowd was clearly partial to the two local candidates — the loudest applause came when Bernier and Steven Blaney were introduced, while polite applause greeted the 11 other non-Quebec contestants.
You can read the rest of this article here.
In his bid for the Conservative Party leadership, Andrew Scheer has the bulk of endorsements from current and former politicians.
But because of the rules of the campaign, the contest will be decided in favour of the candidate who can garner the broadest base of support nationwide. Seen through that lens, Scheer's endorsement advantage over Erin O'Toole, Maxime Bernier and Lisa Raitt narrows.
Scheer has 58 endorsements from current and former politicians at either the federal or provincial level. O'Toole has 23, followed by Bernier with 16 and Raitt with 13.
You can read the rest of this article here.
Should auld contestants be forgot, and never brought to mind?
A few Conservative leadership candidates might be asking themselves this question on New Year's Eve.
That's because the first deadline in the Conservative leadership race looms on Dec. 31, when contestants who have already launched their campaigns have to pay the party a $50,000 compliance deposit in order to stay in the running.
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It was a year for change. A new government getting settled in Ottawa, a new president on the way in the United States, and two opposition parties searching for the next leaders to take on Justin Trudeau.
But if there was one lesson to take from 2016, it is that politics can be unpredictable.
You can listen to the podcast here, subscribe to future episodes here, and listen to past episodes here.
What were the successes of Trudeau's first full year in office? What were some of his failures? What has the Liberal government's new approach and the election of Donald Trump taught the media about what matters most to people outside of the political bubble in Ottawa or Washington, D.C.?
And what to make of the candidate-less NDP leadership race and the cavalcade of contestants in the running for the Conservative top job?
Joining me on the last Pollcast episode of 2016 are Susan Delacourt, columnist for the Toronto Star and iPolitics, and Althia Raj, the Ottawa Bureau Chief of The Huffington Post Canada.
You can listen to the podcast here, subscribe to future episodes here, and listen to past episodes here.
A new poll suggests no candidates for the Conservative Party leadership have been able to lift themselves out of the pack in the eyes of Canadians and Conservative supporters — a stark contrast to the last two races for the leadership of the New Democrats and Liberals, when clear front-runners had already emerged at this stage of the campaign.
The poll, conducted by Forum Research and published in Postmedia's Sun chain of newspapers, found that none of the contestants tested in the poll scored more than 9 per cent support among Conservative voters, while 49 per cent said they preferred "someone else."
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The most recent set of fundraising data for the Conservative leadership race put Kellie Leitch narrowly ahead of Maxime Bernier in total dollars raised. But an analysis of where these contributions came from suggests Bernier has a bigger and broader base of national support within the party — and that puts him in a much better position to win than Leitch.
Between April 1 and Sept. 30, the latest data available from Elections Canada, Leitch raised $450,421.56, a little more than Bernier's $427,508.72. Ontario MP Michael Chong raised $208,913.72, while Alberta MP Deepak Obhrai raised $1,100.
The other 10 contestants either launched their campaigns after Sept. 30 or had no contributions to report prior to that date.
Taking into account individuals who made multiple contributions and counting them only once, Bernier raised his money from 1,788 individual contributors, compared to 1,049 for Leitch, 370 for Chong and two for Obhrai. In other words, Bernier received money from 56 per cent of all donors to the race in this period, compared to 33 per cent for Leitch and 11.5 per cent for Chong.
But over and above Bernier's advantage in the number of donors, he has a superior regional distribution of that support than does either Leitch or Chong.
And that's a decisive factor in the Conservative leadership race.
You can read the rest of this article here.
