Mark Carney’s support surge coming largely from former Conservatives, poll finds

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s sustained surge in the polls is coming predominantly from former Conservatives, according to new figures published by the Angus Reid Institute.

According to a new poll published on Thursday, 13 per cent of respondents who voted Conservative in 2025 would now vote for a Carney-led Liberal party if given the chance.

That may not sound like a lot, but given that a record 8.1 million Canadians voted Conservative in the last federal election, that works out to an exodus equivalent to one million votes – more than enough to flip dozens of Conservative ridings across Ontario and Atlantic Canada.

And in a feat with few precedents in Canadian political history, the Liberals are luring over Tories while simultaneously siphoning off support from both the NDP and the Bloc Québécois – accelerating a trend that already saw both parties lose catastrophically to the Liberals in 2025.

The New Democrats scored their worst-ever result in 2025, winning just seven seats and 6.29 per cent of the vote. And of those voters, nearly a third have since decamped to the Liberals. The Angus Reid Institute found that 31 per cent of respondents who voted NDP in 2025 now intended to vote for Carney.

Although, notably, this NDP exodus was cancelled out by a tide of disaffected Liberal voters heading in the other direction; 15 per cent of 2025 Liberal voters are now expressing an intention to vote NDP.

This is predominantly why the NDP is back to polling at 12 per cent. Still catastrophic for a party that has spent much of the past 20 years polling at around 20 per cent.

No such exchange was evident among Bloc Quebecois supporters; 21 per cent of those who voted Bloc in 2025 are now in the Liberal camp.

Among Liberal voters, meanwhile, the poll couldn’t identify a single respondent who had since switched their allegiance to the Bloc.

All of these trends is why every available pollster now projects a commanding Liberal majority were an election to be called.

The new Angus Reid Institute poll puts the Liberals at 46 per cent to the Conservatives’ 32 per cent. Two weeks ago, a Liaison Strategies poll found much the same; Liberals at 46 per cent against 29 per cent for the Conservatives.

A seat projection of the Liaison results by election modeller Raymond Liu showed it translating to a Liberal caucus of 239 seats; 69.8 per cent of the House of Commons (as compared to the slim 50.5 per cent of seats they enjoy now).

Were such an election to occur, it would represent the largest Liberal landslide since 1949, when Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent secured enough seats to equal 72.9 per cent of the House of Commons.

In other words, were an election to be called, Carney would stand to win a mandate stronger than almost any other Liberal prime minister. Pierre Trudeau’s career high was when he won 58.3 per cent of House of Commons seats in the 1968 federal election.

Jean Chrétien won three consecutive majorities, but none of them brought in more than 57 per cent of the House of Commons.

As to why this is happening, it’s due almost entirely to what the Angus Reid Institute calls the “Trump Bump.”

Carney was swept into office by anxieties related to the trade war launched by U.S. President Donald Trump. And in every subsequent breakdown of relations with the U.S., his poll numbers have climbed.

A separate Angus Reid Institute poll released this week found that Carney’s late summer rejection of U.S. trade terms resulted in skyrocketing approval for both the Liberals and him personally.

Before the deal tanked, Carney was sitting at 51 per cent approval. Immediately afterwards, it surged to 62 per cent.

“Carney enjoys majority approval in every province in the country except Saskatchewan,” the poll concluded.

The Angus Reid Institute found despite all of this, Conservatives remain satisfied with leader Pierre Poilievre and the party’s agenda generally – but remain hamstrung so long as the trade war stays in the headlines.

Of Tory voters, 67 per cent expressed satisfaction with Poilievre as leader. And when asked if the party should shift its platform, Conservative voters were much more likely to say the party should become more right-wing, not less.

While 58 per cent said the party should “stay the course ideologically,” 21 per cent prescribed a move to the “right of the political spectrum,” against just eight per cent who advocated a “move to the left of the political spectrum.”

The phenomenon of conservative political support being steamrolled by voter ire at Trump is not unique to Canada.

In Australia, the country’s main conservative option, the Liberal-National Coalition, had been poised for an easy victory in a 2025 general election until a series of punitive tariffs levied by the Trump administration swung support back to the incumbent Labor government.

Thursday’s poll was based on an online survey conducted from Sept. 2-7, among a randomized sample of 1,811 Canadian adults. For comparison purposes, a probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points, 19 times out of 20