With just days to go before Election Day, the 2025 federal election is shaping up to be one of the most closely watched—and misunderstood—in recent memory.
Most polls, including ours at Abacus Data, show a tight race. For the past three weeks, we’ve consistently had the Liberals ahead of the Conservatives by 2 to 3 points nationally. Among those who have already voted or are most certain to vote, the gap grows to 5. That may not sound like much. But in our electoral system and in the current context, that would be plenty for the Liberals to win a majority.
Because in Canada, a party doesn’t need to win the most votes to win the most seats. And if there’s one thing Conservatives should know by now, it’s this: winning the popular vote is not enough.
Voter efficiency: The seat–vote disconnect
Let’s start with a basic fact that often gets lost in political coverage: Canada does not elect its government through a single national vote. It elects 343 individual members of Parliament, each from a local riding. The party that wins the most seats—assuming it can gain confidence—forms government.
This is where voter efficiency comes in. A party is considered efficient when its support is spread out in such a way that it wins lots of ridings by small margins, and doesn’t waste votes in ridings it can’t win or already has locked up. The Liberals, time and again, have mastered this. Their vote is well distributed across urban, suburban, and battleground ridings in Atlantic Canada, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. In contrast, Conservative support is more geographically concentrated—especially in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and parts of rural British Columbia and Ontario.
This means that to win as many seats as the Liberals, the Conservatives don’t just have to match them in national support—they have to substantially outperform them.
A tale of two elections—and a systemic challenge
We’ve seen this dynamic play out before. In 2019, Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives won the popular vote with 34.3 percent compared to the Liberals’ 33.1 percent. But the Liberals won 36 more seats and stayed in government. In 2021, the story repeated itself: the Conservatives edged out the Liberals in votes, but still came up short in seats.
Fast forward to today, and the polling shows the Liberals with a slight lead. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that most pollsters are underestimating Conservative support again—as they did by 1 to 3 points in the past two elections. Let’s apply a 2-point boost to the Conservatives and a 2-point discount to the Liberals based on our latest Abacus Data numbers. That would give us a national vote share of:
- Liberal: 39 percent
- Conservative: 39 percent
- NDP: 11 percent
- Bloc Québécois: 7 percent
A tie in the national vote. So who wins?
According to the seat projection simulation at TooCloseToCall.ca, the result would be:
- Liberals: 168 seats
- Conservatives: 132 seats
- Bloc: 32 seats
- NDP: 11 seats
- Greens: 0
In other words: a comfortable Liberal minority.
What if the Conservatives win the popular vote?
Let’s move the needle again. Suppose the Conservatives surge and win the popular vote by 2 points—40 percent to 38 percent for the Liberals. Based on the regional redistribution of that support, the model estimates that the result would be:
- Liberals: 168 seats
- Conservatives: 141 seats
- Bloc: 32 seats
- NDP: 10 seats
Yes, even if the Conservatives beat the Liberals by 2 points nationally, they still finish more than 25 seats behind.
People wave signs as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks during a rally in Montreal, Wednesday, June 19, 2024. Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press.
How is that possible? Because the extra votes often come where they don’t need them—rural Alberta, safe seats in Saskatchewan, or deep-blue strongholds in Southern Ontario. Meanwhile, in the dense suburban battlegrounds of the GTA or Lower Mainland B.C., a few thousand votes can swing multiple seats.
What it takes for a Conservative majority
So, what would it take for Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives to win the 170-plus seats needed for a majority?
Using the same model, we find they’d need to win about 42 percent of the vote and lead the Liberals by 6 points overall—assuming the NDP get 11 percent and the Bloc 7 percent.
That’s a 6-point national lead—and the Conservatives would need to get a larger share of the vote than any Conservative Party has won since Mulroney’s re-election in 1988.
And the regional math is just as daunting. To get close to a majority, the Conservatives would need to:
- Win British Columbia by 8 points
- Take Ontario by 7
- Hit 27 percent in Quebec
- Capture 60 percent of the vote in Alberta
- Hold Liberals to under 28 percent in Ontario and Alberta combined
That’s not just a win. That’s close to a blowout. And based on current trends, it would require a 7 to 10 point swing from where the race stands now—a swing that would represent one of the biggest polling misses in Canadian history.
The Liberal efficiency advantage
Why is this happening?
Partly, it’s the Liberal coalition. Their support is urban, diverse, and consistent in vote-rich regions. The NDP, which in the past helped split progressive votes, is running weaker than usual—barely holding onto half of its 2021 support. That means the Liberals are consolidating much of the centre-left vote. And with Carney’s favourables still high, they’re also pulling in soft Conservative switchers (mostly Baby Boomers) concerned about global instability and the Trump factor.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives would run up big wins where they don’t need them, and struggle to break through in regions where tight races matter most.
The bottom line
Unless something dramatic happens in these final days—like a massive polling miss or a last-minute collapse in Liberal support—the Conservatives are unlikely to form government, even if they close the gap or win the popular vote by a point or two.
The cruel irony for Conservatives is that they are probably going to get more votes than last time. They could even win the most. But they are unlikely to win the right votes, in the right places.
And that’s the difference between winning the fight and forming government in Canada.
