Rona Ambrose and the Bleak Future of the Cons

With just three days to go before the Cons choose a new leader, I see that Rona Ambrose is still trying to whip up some interest in the event.

Still claiming that she was always planning to leave. 

“If I was going to stay in politics, I would have run for the full leadership. I made that choice then. I knew I was going to leave.”

And still insisting that her decision to run for the exit had nothing to do with the dilapidated state of the Harper Party.



But the Cons are not in good shape. With thirteen leadership candidates their party could easily be blown to pieces.

And as I've been pointing out recently, most recent polls don't match Ambrose's sunny view, and neither does this one. 

In an election held today, the Conservatives would win 27% of the vote, down 5 points from their result on Election Day 2015. For the last 18 months, the average support for the Conservative Party has been 28%. 

The Cons are stuck in a rut, the party is split between religious fanatics and racist bigots. The leading candidate likes to be called Mad Max.

But is better known in Quebec as the boob from the Beauce...



The Cons also can't count on the NDP to split the progressive vote, as they have in the past, because so far at least they're also not going anywhere...



48% would consider voting NDP today. That number is well below the 60% achieved during the run-up to the last election and lower than the 52% we found just before the vote. In the intervening months, the NDP accessible voter pool has shrunk. At one point the NDP potential pool was 20 points bigger than that of the Conservative Party, today that gap is basically zero. 

And to make matters worse, the Cons are losing their demographic advantage.

For many years, the Conservatives had a built-in electoral advantage: if they trailed the Liberals among younger voters, they more than made up for that by having an advantage among older voters, who were more numerous, and who turned out at a higher rate to cast a ballot. Today, we see the Conservatives trailing the Liberals by more than 10 points among voters over 45, by 16 points among those 30-44 and by 28 points among those under 30.

At a time when the millennial generation is preparing to make its presence felt.

Further complicating the electoral math for the party is the fact that by 2019, Millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) will be the largest segment of the electorate. This will be the first time in over 40 years that Boomers will not make up the largest portion of the electorate. 

And for many of that generation Trudeau is their natural leader...



One they can relate to, and have fun with...





And one they will almost certainly help return to power with another crushing majority...



I know the Trudeau haters will be tearing out their hair, or their haemorrhoids.

Or threatening his wife.

As only they can.

But I enjoy their pain. Demography is destiny.

And it seems that the future will belong to us....