The latest MainStreet and Nanos tracking polls, (actually pretty much every poll since yesterday) is looking good for my Liberals. I don't want to jinx or curse anything, but if P.M. Trudeau actually does lead the Liberal party to a stable minority (or even small majority?) on Monday night, I was wondering how you think he managed this? I am recalling back to a Susan Delacourt tweet back at the height of the SNC-Lavalin affair that she had never seen a government collapse in real time like this (that was the day of the Jane Phillipot resignation). At one point, the Conservatives were in strong majority government territory. What happened to change this? I hypothesize that it was a mix of:
1. The Raptors winning the NBA championship kind of led to a feel-good patriotic moment that has always been good for incumbent governments (think back to Clinton and Reagan receiving bounces for holding the Olympics in the USA in their re-elect years). Look at the polls on Wikipedia and it shows the Liberals starting their recovery after the championship run, suprisingly enough.
2. Doug Ford's massive unpopularity in Ontario is the biggest factor, probably.
3. Strong GDP and job growth is a close 2nd to Doug Ford's massive unpopularity, isn't it?
4. Jagmeet's stunning rise in the polls may be a missing ingredient. Perhaps rather than the dreaded left-vote spit, he's actually taking votes away from Red Tories who are leary of Scheer but can't stomach a vote for Trudeau? If that's the case, we can thank the NDP for saving Canada this time the way that the BQ ironically did in 2008 by preventing Harper from winning a majority back then.
5. It could simply be that in a 3-party system, we'd be looking at a Scheer majority this weekend. Perhaps, we are lucky that the anti-Liberal vote consolidated in 5 different directions rather than around Scheer as it may have done a decade or so ago. I guess if you factor in the BQ, Green, PPC, and solid NDP support near 20% in the polls, that there's just not enough of the pie left for Scheer to sneak in on based on anti-Liberal resentment alone.
However, I still feel like I'm missing something in the Liberal recovery. I mean the SNC-Lavalin scandal was one of the biggest in Canadian history (or perhaps it wasn't and the media obsession with it for months simply led voters to assume it was?). How did near-certain defeat turn into probably at least a 2004-size Liberal minority on Monday night? Scheer didn't run a stellar camapaign but arguably Trudeau's blackface scandal was 10x calamatious as anything Scheer did. So, it's quite remarkable. So, I'll ask again. How did the Liberals rise from the ashes of SNC-Lavalin to be where they are now?