BC United Is Not Going to Make It | BC Election Forecast

hello it's the Great Canadian Bagel here coming to you with another BC 2024 election forecast now before I begin i' just like to once again shout out all my channel members I really appreciate all the support you guys give me and if you want to guys support the channel support the work I do by all means go down into the link in the description below and join the channel otherwise you can do your regular YouTube things like share subscribe com below and you know all that kind of stuff it really supports really helps makes it easier for to do this so with that let us begin so the BC election has beginning progressively more and more competitive as time's going on initially when I started this back this forecasting back in October last year for this election it wasn't looking very hot or or very close we see back in October 9th and if we go back to the seat trend on October 9th the NDP was forecast like 72 seats and even that that was even kind of a low ball at the time I was more bullish on the bearish on the NDP than a lot of other people were and at the time it was 177% for the ND for the conservatives 24 for the BCU and 45 for the NDP and as time has progressed especially through 20124 we've seen it go from a NDP Stomp to if you go all the way up to now the NDP only lead by a little more than 5 Points about 40.7 to 35.2 and that's pretty close and even with that you look at the P the raw polling what do we see oh that's the of course it Scrolls down whenever I put this up here uh here we go sorry uh we look at the raw polling and we're starting to see if we ignore Sovereign North strategies here CU they're not this this poll they publish is pretty dubious I won't go into that here but this is this is a dubious poll but we look here Abacus has the NP up Five Points Ledger up three research go hasm up three M has up one liazon has two and those are five of the seven firms who are actually pulling this race on a regular basis the other firm being P Palace you could maybe say Angus polling this regularly but they only had like two polls this year so or two polls since I started in this so I'm not sure if I would call that regular no I mean you could say seven but Angus and Palace haven't published since late June so it's hard to say where they're sitting to though I'd assume Palace is probably pretty similar to Main Street and what's also worth noting is early on the there was con concerns a lot of people that the ivr telephone polls and the online polls were diverged quite a bit but at this point they're pretty close together liaison Main Street research Co Ledger Abacus they're all roughly within margin of error of each other especially if you accept that my model says it's like slightly more than 40 points 40% they're all roughly within margin of error of that main Street's a little bearish on the NDP but not much now my model has the concer is a lot worse than a lot of these polls and the BCU a little stronger I know some of you commented on that last time around and part of that is just recency bias I have quite a low recency bias in how I do my models compared to a lot of other people who do models and the reason for that is I don't think when you're far outside of the RIT period people's opinions change as fast as people think they do I don't think the polls are wrong but I don't think the polls are necessarily as representative outside of the rip period as other people do that's no fault of the pollsters by the way the pulsers are doing their best but the only people who act an PLL are politically engaged and not everyone is politically engaged but as we get closer and closer to the rip period in eeday I do increase my recency buyas just compared to the July 29th update I did I've increased my recency bi since then and as more polls come out and I increase my recency bi it is going to narrow down so right now this is like the most conservative projection for where the status of the racist and when I say conservative I mean like cautious not like something like political partisan or whatever so what does that tell us here what does that tell us of this race well right now it's pretty neck and neck yes the NDP is leading by 26 seats here but there's 20 seats the BC conservatives are reasonably competitive in nine which there are very close many of which are basically met the outskirts of Metro Vancouver area and the conservatives win all 20 close seats or all 20 seats that they are close to the NDP and that the NDP is leading they win the race now that's a tall order I'm not saying it's a very likely outcome but it is a possible outcome it's a thing that could happen compared to when you look at say October 9th last year there really wasn't a possible outcome for anyone else to win and if you slide this over two three points more to the conservatives like you give them two or three more more points then you start seeing it as like 40 to 52 it's only a 12 seat lead a lot of these other places are well competitive you look at say North Island it's very competitive then look at Vancouver Lara you give the conservatives three points and that's within margin of error some the things these writings can get very very very close and what I think we're going to start seeing here which we're already have been seeing is more and more and more is BC United candidates are going to drop out defect or phone it in and what I think we're actually going to see here which will be quite remarkable if we look at 2020 look at how the BC conservatives pulled in 2020 in BC from March 2018 to May 2020 they were polling somewhere between 10 and 15% then the rate has dropped somewhere in September here and they're probably let's say around like [Music] 10% and then they drop all the way down to this final result here which is two percentage points 1.9 to be really precise that's extremely close extremely close sorry I phrase it wrong extremely bad like that's an extreme collapse and I I think we are about to see the exact same thing for BCU we're kind of already seeing them utterly collapsed here if you look at this trend line of polling and you look at the trend line of my model you also see this they're at 24% in October 2023 and now they're at 133% just since June 10th they've lost six percentage points now part of this is between June 10th and July 29th I changed some of my structural I structurally changed some things in my model some assumptions but that's that's even worse for them it's made it worse for them what I think we're going to see is right now we're in August I think a lot of people in BC are on vacations they're not fully paying attention because they're relaxing they're enjoying the summer they might be out of the country they're not as paying attention to Politics as you normally or as you would expect during a RIT during an election and then once the elections dropped sometime in September depending on how long epie wants the race to actually be you're going to see people start paying attention they're going to start looking into things they're going to be like okay what do the different candidates stand for How likely are different parties to win and then you're going to start seeing a combination of selection effect to people voting for the policies they they like and strategic voting the selection effect will be there's likely a lot of BC United voters still current voters who are very conservative or relatively conservative who would rather the conservative party but up until now might think they have no chance of winning or might not know they exist but they would rather the policy the conservative party are advocating for so as soon as they realize that this policy package exists they're going to hope for it and then you have the Strategic voting aspect where you're going to see people or current BCU supporters this 13% they're going to look at the election they're going to be like my guy can't win the BCU dude is not going to win this writing so the conservative flank of the BCU is going to vote conservative strategically possibly and the liberal flank of the BCU might strategically vote NDP so what we will probably see going into October is the NDP is probably going to gain 2 three points and the conservatives might gain two three points over and above their current pulling over and above my current modeling now the BC conservatives might gain more than two or three points maybe they'll gain five points and the NDP will gain two points or something like that let's say but either way the BC United is going to fall quite heavily and it wouldn't even surprise me if they fall down to single to low single digits like 2 three four 5% range and why is that well in a first P the post system there is no purpose to vote for a party who has no hope of winning I'm going to rephrase that there is very little utility to voting for a party that has no hope of winning and this isn't the case of like the PPC federally where the voters of the PPC don't think that there's any other party that represents them that's different or the green party those voters don't think anyone else represents them in which case they're going to vote for that party because even though they have little utility in that vote You could argue all their other votes have very little utility because yes you could H have a high utility vote and vote for the NDP if you don't actually want David eie to win or don't like what David David eie did it's still a low utility vote because it didn't do anything for you anything you wanted but what we and what that will mean here for Falcon is the people who are okay with rustad or who are okay with AB are going to leave because United offers them a very low vote utility but the people who don't like rustad and eie will just stay home they won't bother voting why would you take out 3 4 hours of your day to vote for a party in total freefall not a lot of people are going to do that because that's the other thing to keep in mind too this isn't like the case of the BC greens cu the BC greens have never been a dominant party they're always been the scrappy Underdog party in BC so their voters aren't going to have the same philosophy they're not looking at this as aha we're doing bad this election they're looking at this and be like we're doing normal the BC unit is going to look at this and be like we're being slaughtered we have no seats anywhere where you're competitive why bother there's going to be a lot of that I think perhaps this is early prognos station here but it's very possible that if we compare this to 20 and we scroll this up turn that was like 54 something per. there is a nonzero chance unless the BC conservatives are turning out a lot of people who did not vote in 2020 that voting turnout could fall significantly in 2024 because a lot of BC liberal BC United voters who don't vote conservative or don't vote NDP might go home and who are those voters they're the federal liberal voters they're the poor say blue liberal types who want a fiscally responsible government but don't aren't really fussed about social policy or might be slightly socially liberal those guys will probably not vote for the conservatives because they don't like the social policy of the conservatives they probably won't vote the for the NDP because those guys don't like the fiscal irresponsibility of the NDP so what does Kevin Falcon do the genius itical Mastermind behind the success of BC United to try to shore up one of the core factions of his base he goes to offer probably the most Reckless tax cut plan I have ever seen in Canadian history so what is this plan so he's the BC United is offering everyone as a package that no one will pay taxes on their first $50,000 of income and this would roughly mean that the government is foregoing $5.4 billion a year in Revenue at a time when BC is running record deficits and there is really no plan stated on how they're going to compensate for this with budget cuts because the BC unit has also already promised a balanced budget within their first term so they already have to stop reduce a lot of spending to hit that since they're cutting $5.4 billion of taxes there's really no reasonable expectation that they would raise taxes to try to pay off the deficit so this means they're going to try to balance the budget while giving the probably the canadi Canada's largest tax cut in history but even with that this tax cut is quite of a dubious tax cut even in and of itself because the way it's structured most of the time when right-wing parties do tax cuts leftwing parties don't really do tax cuts if they want to help people they usually give a make a new program they don't usually cut taxes yes there's some exceptions that but general terms they don't really cut taxes at least permanently it might be like a WB canoe who suspends the gas tax for like a year or whatever but they very rarely cut taxes in and of themselves but for more right-wing party usually when you cut taxes you try to cut taxes more uniformly not just below this threshold you pay no taxes because what that does is at $50,000 of income you create a very high marginal effective tax rate what that means is your 50,000 And1 in BC I think the BC tax code let's see yeah so that would mean oh just bring it onto this screen so you can see it that would mean here assuming they get they zero this out to 0% and they change this bracket that mean you go from paying 0% provincial income tax to paying 7 point 7% as quite a big jump there's a reason why while we might have many brackets most of these brackets are not very big and actually a lot of conservative tax reform proposals might be to cut taxes but also smooth out some of these jumps so like this one is uh 3 five no 3.7 sorry my math is bad here tired you know all that stuff this one's 2.8 the general idea and this is something Paul has been talking about if you look ferally at some of his videos on his YouTube channel is to smooth out those kind of cut drawbacks those uh smooth the curve out so there's not a big spikes at certain incomes cuz what that means is that big spike that extra little bit of income you make actually doesn't make near as much as you think because you're paying 7.7% additional tax one before you were not that's a quite a big jump that really means that that 50,000 And1 dollar is not really worth as much effort as it before so yes for people who make less $50,000 is a really good win but it really does discourage people from working it discourages people from doing overtime or voluntary overtime it discourages people from doing like really striving to get those raises or getting a better job because you lose tax competitiveness in a way that you don't before that can is going from 4.7 to 7.7 we're only losing 3% more so the efficiency drop is a lot lower for the effort whereas 0 to 7.7 it's a much larger drop now I can't I'm not an econ Economist I can't tell you how much this would affect the macro economics of this but it is it is a drawback it is a negative to work which is a that a lot of conservatives are not going to like the fact that it's a massive tax cut a lot of left leaning people are not going to like that and it's a very big bold thing which means a lot of more Centrist types I.E these are the three factions of the BC United by the way are not going to like this cuz it's really big it's really bold it's really flashy and it's very Reckless now it's not in Kevin Falcons defense this isn't crazy it's just unrealistic perhaps is the right way to say this because if BC manages to have a 3% sustained Revenue growth per year I believe is 3% I could be slightly wrong correct me if you want to do the math below it correct me the wrong but I was talking to uh guy I know who was doing this and I believe he said it was 3% who who crunches numbers like this this is the he's an economis is I think he's in school for but anyways doesn't matter uh Ty TI this in on Twitter if you're on Twitter anyways uh he said it was like 3% Revenue growth which is not necessarily the same thing as 3% GDP growth because not all GDP growth is equal if that makes sense right because in this case let's say the GDP grows in BC because of immigration but the immigrants coming in are making less than 50 ,000 a year it's going to have very little impact fiscally yeah you're going to have the sales tax and some corporate tax stuff but not as much as if everyone in BC made $10,000 more dollar that makes sense so it's not an entirely implausible thing if we were in like the80s when in the GDP was growing like 5 6 7% now there's inflation on that so it wasn't like real GDP wasn't growing that fast but anyways in that situation yeah you probably could recoup that fiscal deficit in one year or sorry one term but right now the best expectation for Canada at large and I think this is a bit unrealistic is like 2 and a half% next year for GDP growth which is not necessarily 2 and a half% revenue growth because as I said again not all revenue sources are going to be affected equally because of how the tax system works how the tax structures work so it's not impossible to recoup this and maybe the Kevin Falcons of the world will argue that this is going to Spur investment it's going to Spur people to work etc etc so it's going to probably boost things like sales tax and all that so it's going to recoup some of the loss immediately Day Zero and that's probably true but you still have all sorts of other issues with it the the efficiency the fact that it's just so big that you need quite a optimistic hand and BC already has a large deficit that needs to be paid back so all it is to say highing the pr and cons of this is this is likely going to alienate a lot of people who are actually in the current Coalition for BC United because a lot of the people who occupy the core of the BC United the blue liberals types the people who vote for Justin Trudeau but would not vote for David eie they're generally more fiscally responsible they're the kind of people who would really like a crate Chen as a leader of the liberal party and this is something that's going to probably alienate them cuz and I've talked to some people who are like this and they are all very concerned about this it is a very big it's a very bold it's a very risky policy and what this actually tells us about Kevin Falcon and BC United is that they are desperate you don't unveil in August big policy platforms not one an elections coming up and frankly even in or when an election isn't coming up you you don't do this in August you don't reveal big things in August you only do that because things are really bad for you cuz polling is really bad you only do that because another one of your MPS just defected to a different party and that's where BC United is that's where Kevin Falcon is and the big story of this election has always been in will always be that Kevin Falcon has run this party BC United in probably the worst fashion that any Canadian politician has ever run a party there's lots of people out there myself included at times who make fun of Kim Campbell for her disastrous 20 1993 election performance and that joke that she has the crown of disastrous performance going from majority to two seats getting her party almost wiped out Falcon is infinitely worse than that he's not only going to get zero seats based on all current projections from everyone I saw who has any credibility in election modeling he's very likely going to slip into singled digigit vote share and he himself has almost no chance of winning any seat any he's barely in third PL he's not even close to second place in I think any seat his own seat here he's in third place Vancouver Quin kill quilt chenna I'm not trying to pronounce that actually anyways and every action he has done since becoming leader of the BC United has been to further damage the party the brand the message the goal Kim Campbell you could at least argue first off inherited a pretty bad hand from Malone because Malone was a pretty unpopular leader to say the least when he finally retired but she managed to be competitive going going into 1993 there was a time when people thought she was going to win she fumbled the bag which is why she gets the reputation she has but there was a time she could have won there's never been a time Kevin Falcon could have won and unlike some other situations I believe there was a be New Brunswick election where the new brunic liberals perhaps won every seat which is kind of funny but after that election the BC or the new Bruns PCS I believe re rebounded they gained seats and now they currently form government Beast United won't survive this election not even in a merger form the idea that there's going to be a merger following the election is it's dead it's sta that makes no sense why would rustad merge what one especially if rust ad's polling above let's say he gets and finishes like 40% of the vote why would he merge what's the point you don't merge a 40er party with a 8center party it's not a thing you do that'd be like saying why don't why didn't Aeron ul and uh Maxim berni merg their parties they're both right-wing well why would they what is there to gain from that there's nothing to gain from that and that's what's going to happen here BC United has utterly failed the leadership is the prime example of people who have been promoted past their point of competence and it's not just Falcon it's also the campaign managers the advisers the Consultants they all have no idea what they're doing either that or perhaps maybe let's say generously the campaign managers are suggesting correct things and Falcons overriding them Perhaps Perhaps but if that was the case I think you should resign if Kev Falcon's overriding you at this stage and since they're not resigning I'm going to say they're not being overridden that they're being listened to and they feel listened to which means that they're just all wildly incompetent they've been promoted past the point that they should have ever been promoted nothing they have done has worked they fired rustad back in 2020 two or 2023 doesn't matter because he said something slightly off well I thing a lot of conservative laymen support agree with that climate change isn't an emergency he said that and that was an egregious offense to Falcon he kicked him out of the party a lot of conservatives believe that is it true or not that doesn't matter and it's not really the core point of this channel but voters believe that that's all that matters and that's something you really need to understand when you're watching this Channel and stuff like this I don't actually really care what's true or not when we're discussing electoral politics in like Canada or the us or whatever the truth doesn't matter what matters is what voters believe and how they're voting on it if everyone believes that marshmallows are meat and they act accordingly well to electoral politics marshmallows are meat doesn't matter what what a marshmallow actually is doesn't matter what climate change actually is if everyone acts like this then that is the truth in electoral politics electoral politics is not truth seeking it's winning seeking it's a very unrelated thing I wish it was truth seeking but it's never been that there's never been a world where it has been truth seeking it has always been Victory seeking power seeking so Falcon fires him for a very uncontroversial opinion among his own base then Falcon proceeds to do things like rename his party for no reason I don't think it hurt the party much but it was also pointless it did nothing there was no reason for it and it really betrayed a lack of understanding to even try to do something like that and then every single step of the way he's made the wrong choices he failed to really push back on things like SOI a lot of his base does not like SOI he really failed to jump on housing at all in fact believe he picked the nimi Lane if I'm not mistaken now I wouldn't say rustad is run running as like the strongest yimi in the world but he is talking about housing he's talking about how things are being broken and the problems the NDP government has caused Falcon didn't do that at all Falcon didn't push back on safe injection C sites rustad did and then when rustad started sniping out MPS from Falcon Bruce Bannerman the first one there's several others since then I can't remember all their names he didn't react or at least if he did react it wasn't very public it wasn't very successful he never really tried to shore up his own party or his own basee or his own polling in any substantial way you look at the official Twitter account for the BC United party and they cope and lie about polling they will take a poll that is probably fake and be like aha we are now not as far in third place we're winning but it was probably a fake poll or they'll compare two polls from two pollers on two different poll dates be like ah we're gaining ground or it's only polls no one's voted yet like all these kind of like stupid conspiracy garbage nonsense people do when they try to cope about polls when their party's losing and the thing you need to understand about this is it doesn't actually hurt you mean materially to do this but it also doesn't do anything for you no one's benefited from coping and lying about polls polls are real crazy right statistics in polling works it's almost like this has been an industry that has existed for the dawn of Elections now old style polling was really complicated you actually go door like he basically canvased random neighborhoods across the country and then tallied it up pretty hardcore actually old style bowling but often times I actually might put uh mail stuff to people I think Pew still mails out a lot of stuff actually but modern stuff you either use internet or telephone it's a lot faster cheaper but anyways and that's where we're really here and in case you're wondering people watching this why I haven't really focused much on eie this particular series is I don't really think EB's doing anything good or bad he's not really doing anything remarkable actually everything that's interesting happening this race from an electoral standpoint from a politics standpoint from a learning standpoint to see why campaigns do good or bad or what's going on E is not doing anything materially good or bad he's running a very normal decent albeit generic campaign for an NDP now he hasn't really started fully yet so maybe things will change coming into the rip period but as of now he he's not really doing anything wrong nor is he doing anything right he's just doing I think his personality and the way he governs compared to say John Horan has hurt B&P a little bit but as you can see with the vote chair but I don't think that's significant I don't think it's a situation where aha EB's going to lose because of that if eie loses it's not necessarily because of his campaign style good or bad he's probably if he does ends up losing going to be combination of Russ at really hitting the right Nails quality of being super successful federally pulling rusted across the finish line or just a matter of incumbent an anti-incumbency moment caused by generalized inflation and has in problems well basically caused by immigration and in uh deficit spending from the federal government but that's a whole another topic altogether but a lot of the things that are thinking eie actually are or hurting eie are out of BC's control the population is growing too fast he can't really control that a lot of money was spent and it's inflated the economy he can't really control that he's in deficit spendings hurting that too but not as much as the feds have done but otherwise he's kind of generic and normal for an NDP and I tend to talk about the more interesting or the active participants and the active participants of this race have really been the conservatives and United same story with the greens too the greens are just being the greens they're not doing anything remarkable this time around at least for now but that I'll bid you all Ado and I will see you next week with something different probably another us video but we'll see we'll see and with that have a good week