Sean Speer: Are the Conservatives stuck no matter what they do?

The problem lies with the Conservative Party itself. It starts with the highest floor of support of any major political party. Its support in election results or even polling has rarely fallen below the high 20s. (The Liberals got less than 19 percent of the vote in the 2011 election and frequently polled in the low 20s in 2024.) Yet the Conservatives have typically struggled to push their voter ceiling beyond 40 percent. (Stephen Harper won his majority government in 2011 with just below 40 percent.) Poilievre’s success stems from both strengthening the party’s floor of support and pushing up its ceiling. His efforts to reconsolidate the political Right after the 2021 election, which saw the People’s Party earn nearly 5 percent of the popular vote and even higher in several ridings, were a necessary precondition to winning the election. Put bluntly: you cannot tend to the party’s ceiling if the floor is falling out below you. That strategy has clearly worked. The People’s Party has been decimated, and the Conservative Party’s core base is bigger and more galvanized than at any time in its history. As discussed, Poilievre also raised the party’s ceiling of support by reaching new and different voters. We’ve talked and written extensively, for instance, about the political realignment and some of the counterintuitive developments occurring in our politics—including the Conservative Party’s gains with working-class voters. Poilievre isn’t singlehandedly responsible for these trends, but he clearly deserves some credit. Yet there’s a case that, stretching the ceiling and floor analogy, there isn’t much room to raise the ceiling without the floor giving way. Which is to say: the Conservatives may find themselves in an almost one-for-one tradeoff between their base voters and marginal voters in the centre. The messages, policies, and presentation required to appeal to one group risk turning off the other. There’s no more room to optimize between the voters they have and the marginal voters they want. That dilemma captures the deeper, and perhaps more unsettling, challenge for Conservatives. The problem may not be Poilievre himself, as so many of his critics assume, but the Conservative Party as a political vehicle. For decades, it has struggled to build a coalition capable of consistently breaking the 40-percent threshold. Its floor is high, but its ceiling seems just as stubbornly low. Poilievre has successfully widened that gap by galvanizing the base and reaching new voters, but it’s far from obvious that the coalition can grow much further. That isn’t an easy conclusion for Conservatives to confront. But if they try again in the next election and still come up short—in spite of all that Poilievre has accomplished—it may be a sign that the problem lies less with the leader than with the structure of Canadian politics itself. In a two-party race, Conservatives may be destined to fall just short of a governing majority, no matter how shrewd the strategy or how compelling the leader. At some point, they will have to ask: Is the problem Poilievre, or is it first-past-the-post itself?