O’Leary well ahead, but not as strong as popular vote suggests

February 13, 2017

Kevin O’Leary has a strong lead in the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, the first iPolitics CPC Leadership Tracker report shows.

O’Leary has a large lead in the popular vote, according to a poll of 5,487 Conservative party members reached between Jan. 5 and Feb. 3.

There is no guarantee that O’Leary, who only launched his campaign last month, will maintain his lead. He is ahead of Maxime Bernier by eight points. Kellie Leitch trails Bernier by six points and the other 11 candidates are all well behind.

Our polling was conducted before O’Leary’s first appearance in a debate and before his posting and retraction of a shooting practice video. Our next round of polling, to be released next week, will provide clues as to how his recent performance has affected voters’ preferences.

The popular vote does not necessarily tell us everything, though. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but lost the electoral college. The same thing could happen in this race, because some ridings have far more members than others.

There are 338 ridings in Canada. Each riding has 100 points to be distributed among the candidates. There are 33,800 points available for distribution on the first ballot. A candidate will need 16,901 points to win. (Note only 335 ridings are represented in our poll. Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut are excluded because of practical difficulties polling members there.)

Because some candidates’ support is clustered geographically, popular support among the membership likely won’t yield the same percentage of points.

Both Bernier and Leitch gain at the expense of O’Leary when the votes are weighted for their likely distribution as points, revealing a tighter race.

Both Chris Alexander and Lisa Raitt benefit from this as well. The top five candidates are in a fairly narrow band between seven and 24 per cent.