PQ leads as election day approaches, but race tightens for 2nd place: new poll

PQ leads as election day approaches, but race tightens for 2nd place: new poll

Liberal support in the Eastern Townships, traditionally a party stronghold, appears to slip

Two weeks out from election day, the Parti Québécois appears to hold a distinct lead in the polls.

A new Segma Research poll, commissioned by Radio-Canada and Les Coops de l’information, conducted between Sept. 8 and 17, found that 29 per cent of respondents would vote for the PQ.

The poll, which surveyed 5,572 Quebecers, the vast majority of them francophones, found that the fight for second place in voter intentions was a tighter race.

The Coalition Avenir Québec, the incumbent party led by Christine Fréchette, tallied 22 per cent voter support.

Meanwhile, 19 per cent of respondents said they would vote for the Quebec Liberal Party — a drop from previous polls — placing the party on near equal footing with Éric Duhaime’s Parti Conservateur du Québec (PCQ), a revamped party whose modern iteration has not yet won a seat in a provincial election.

Québec Solidaire is currently polling in fifth place with support from just 12 per cent of polled voters.

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Provincewide popularity does not necessarily translate into seats due to Quebec’s first-past-the-post voting system. In the last election, in 2022, Duhaime’s PCQ earned 530,804 votes, or 12.9 per cent of the vote, but because the popularity was spread thin throughout the province, the party won no seats.

This time, the party appears poised to win some — likely in the Capitale-Nationale region, which includes Quebec City.

The Segma Research poll found that in that region, the PCQ and the PQ were in a statistical dead heat, tied at 27 per cent of voting intentions.

In five of the 10 total regions polled, voters said they preferred the PQ. But most surprisingly, according to Raynald Harvey, the president of Segma Research, was the Estrie Region, which includes numerous anglophone-majority areas.

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The Estrie region, also referred to as the Eastern Townships, has historically been a Liberal stronghold. Now, the PQ and the CAQ, both of which are polling at 29 per cent in the region, appear poised to make inroads. The Liberals, meanwhile, are in third place in the region, with 15 per cent voter support.

Charles Milliard, the leader of the Liberal Party, is himself running in the Estrie riding of Orford and his campaign caravan has visited the region at least seven times.

Younger poll respondents (age 18 to 34) were more likely to support either Québec Solidaire (27 per cent), the PQ (26 per cent) or the PCQ (23 per cent).

Older voters, by contrast, appear to gravitate toward the CAQ. A significant reason the party is still polling at 22 per cent provincewide is that they remain extremely popular with voters 65 and older.

The generational divide also appears in voter priorities: younger voters were more likely to tell the pollsters that they prioritized the cost of living and access to affordable housing as their main priorities. Older voters were more likely to flag their top priority as access to health care.

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A similar generational divide ran through the sovereignty question: while, broadly, the survey found low support (26 per cent) for Quebec sovereignty and a strong contingent (60 per cent) opposed to it, the opposition was strongest among older voters, 66 per cent of whom said they would vote “no” in a referendum.

Interestingly, only 55 per cent of PQ voters said they would vote “yes” in such a referendum and even fewer (29 per cent) of Québec Solidaire voters said the same.

The poll was conducted by phone and online with 5,572 Quebec voters. A poll of this size would have a margin of error of 1.3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Margins of error are higher for poll sub-categories, like regional assessments and age group breakdowns.

Matthew Lapierre is a journalist at CBC Montreal. He previously worked for the Montreal Gazette and the Globe and Mail. He can be reached at matthew.lapierre@cbc.ca and at mlapierre.07 on Signal.