After a stunning spring, Greens might hit their poll ceiling this summer

Éric Grenier · CBC News

Poll after poll showed Greens reaching new heights — but has the party hit its peak?

Having scored a federal byelection upset and a provincial breakthrough, the Greens were riding a wave of momentum this spring — but that wave could be cresting as this pre-election summer begins.

After a few promising results in provincial elections in 2017 and 2018, the Greens pulled off a couple of firsts over the span of two weeks in April and May, forming the Official Opposition in Prince Edward Island on Apr. 23 and winning the federal byelection in Nanaimo–Ladysmith on May 6.

These events coincided with (and almost certainly propelled) a rise in the polls for the federal Green Party.

At the beginning of the year, the Greens found themselves with around six per cent support nationwide in the CBC’s Canada Poll Tracker, an aggregation of all publicly available polling data. With the exception of a few minor bumps and dips, that is where the party was polling consistently for most of the period since the 2015 federal election.

But on the day the P.E.I. Greens won nearly a third of the vote in that province’s election, the Poll Tracker showed the federal Greens at 8.5 per cent — a modest increase, but an increase nonetheless.

By the time the Greens won in the Vancouver Island riding of Nanaimo–Ladysmith, the Greens had jumped again to 9.3 per cent. Their numbers kept rising, reaching a peak of 11.6 per cent nationally in the Poll Tracker between the Jun. 18 and 26 updates.

The Poll Tracker now puts the Greens at 11.1 per cent support nationwide, a 0.5 percentage point slip for the party. That’s insignificant on its own but it reverses a consistently upward trend, suggesting the Greens might have hit their ceiling.

And that could have significant implications for their hopes of winning at least 12 seats and obtaining recognized party status in the House of Commons.

full story at https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-greens-polls-1.5205397

Categorised in: Canadian News