Why The Conservative Party of Canada Lost the 2025 Elections

January 2025, your party started off with a 25 point lead against the Liberal Party. So if the elections were held in January, it's likely your party would. There's like a 95% chance your party would have won. But when the elections happened in April, only a few months later, your party only won 42% of the popular vote and roughly the same amount of seats in Parliament. So what happened?

Well, look, I don't think you can ever say only 42% of the vote. That's a pretty high watermark for Conservatives. And I think there's a misnomer that somehow you're 25 points ahead. Like, we finished the election with almost 42% of the vote. Eight million plus Canadians voting for us. A very different voter coalition than traditionally Conservatives have had in this country in terms of the pools of voters. But look, you didn't win, so I'm not gonna sit here and spin you. So after every election, you sort of go back to the drawing board and start to look at the pieces of what happened. I think the party's doing that. One perspective. I think it is impossible to talk about this election without talking about just the complete collapse of the ndp, a traditionally progressive party that splits the votes and nervousness around the Conservatives forming government and a lot of that vote ending up with the Liberals. So lots of things to think about, obviously, the issues ahead of us. But I think what we've done, and frankly, primarily what Pierre has done with this party is open up, I think, a new trajectory. Lots of people who had never voted before, never voted Conservative before, to almost have a permissiveness to support a new direction in this party. So not the way that we envision the election certainly happening, not the result that we wanted, but a lot of gains made and a lot to work on to make sure that we get over the finish line the next time.

Right. And what was surprising to me when I did some research, preparation, is that the last time the Conservatives won a majority, which was like 15, 14 years ago, they did with under 40% of the popular vote. Right. And that is when the NDP was strong, for sure.

Look, if you told, if, if you told anybody that, that you could lose an election in this country with over 41% of the vote and over 8 million Canadians voting for you, and, and even a coalition of, of Conservative voters that we'd never seen before, like, you, if you said that in January, like, I would call you nuts. And then there is sort of a lot of, a lot of things that, you know, that lined up as a once in a. You know, once in a blue moon cycle.