Pierre Poilieve wants you to care about crowd sizes
It was the biggest rally you’d ever seen. The biggest in the history of Canadian elections, unless you’ve bothered to read any history of Canadian elections or do the math. But it was big. So big. So big that you might be inclined to ask, why bother even holding a vote?
On Monday, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre held a rally in an industrial warehouse in Edmonton with former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who came out for the first time since 2015 to back a Tory leader. All reports suggest the crowd was electric. It was a good political rally. So, naturally, Conservative partisans pressed the advantage.
After the event, Poilievre boasted of the crowd size, claiming an attendance of “over 15,000 patriotic Canadians” who showed up to rally for “CHANGE.” The not-so-subtle hint being that, of course, not only was the rally a smashing success and an indicator that after 10 years of Liberal rule, the jig was up, but also that size matters.
Never mind that the RCMP told the Globe and Mail the crowd in attendance numbered between 9,000 and 12,000. Parties are allowed to exaggerate. Or … miscount. There is no Bureau of Counting Crowd Sizes, it’s not easy to count that many people, nor is there any law against stretching the figures to a nice, round, robust number that will play so well among partisans and credulous journalists who don’t double-check the facts. No, the crowd had to be 15,000 because 9,000? Well, that’s just embarrassing. In this economy? Why even take the stage in that case?
Journalist Chantal Hébert pointed out that big rallies don’t necessarily mean big wins. She dug into the archives to find that during the 1979 election, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau held a rally at Maple Leaf Gardens and drew 20,000 spectators to rally behind the Liberals. Trudeau lost that election weeks later to Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark, though his party did manage to win more votes, but not seats, than the Tories, hold them to a minority, and, months later, defeat them in the House and return to government in the subsequent election. But that was then.
Of course, 9,000 or 12,000 or 15,000 people at a rally is, in fact, a lot of people at a rally. And yet, it’s also not a statistically significant sample of the population, nor is it an indicator that a party is going to win the election. Our electoral system rewards support across geographies — not concentrated in one place.
Rallying in big numbers in a province friendly to your cause, drawing locals and folks from out of town who want to see the show, says nothing definitive about the broader race. As elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich told CBC News, "Crowd sizes are not a good measure of political support." The measure you’re looking for, of course, is polls. And those tend to have the Liberals ahead.
But damn the polls. That’s nerd stuff. Parties and their leaders are meant to love big crowd sizes and boast of them because big crowd sizes hit you in the gut. You feel them in a way you don’t feel polls, numbers on a screen or a page. Moreover, the rallies serve to, errr, rally the base and signal to everyone else, including the media, that your campaign has the juice. If so many people turn out to chant your name in a big room, you must be guaranteed to win.
Whatever one feels at the moment amidst a sea of roaring supporters, taking a step back, we might come to think that the whole crowd-size measuring contest thing is a bit gauche, isn’t it? A tad cringe? These days, one might even dare to say it’s ever so slightly Trumpy?
In an awkward exchange with the Globe and Mail’s Laura Stone the day after the rally, Poilievre asked “How many people do you think we had last night?”
Stone replied, in good faith, “thousands.” She was kinder and more professional than I would have been.
“Well, that’s pretty obvious,” replied Poilievre. “You can be more precise than that.” He smiled. “When was the last time we had a rally that size in Canada?” he pressed. The smile never broke.
Stone said she’d never been to a rally that size. Poilievre pressed further, saying “You know a lot about politics … I know that if there were a bigger rally than that you’d know about it.”
He might as well have said the sizes were “uuuge”
Poilievre and the Conservatives can continue to lean on big crowds in friendly provinces. And they can float whatever narrative they please about what those crowds imply. The fact is, not long ago, the Tories were up 25 points in the polls, and now they’re behind — and favoured to lose. That’s what the science says, however big the crowds may be. Besides, in the end, the only crowd that matters is the one that turns up, or not, on election day.
Comments
Well the Nazis early on in the 20s figured out crowd size and marketing.
Always book a venue that is slightly smaller than your intended crowd. 50 people in a 400 seat venue is dead (ie GM Place with a crowd of 20k, dead atmosphere for a Lions game, but 25k in Regina is electric). but 70 in a 50 seat the Headlines write themselves.
The reports of long lineups at Carney's venues must be driving PP mad
Funny thing is that Poilievre's and many of his follower's Trumpian instincts are turning off many voters. No matter how many makeovers P.P. undertakes to fool voters, one thing is undeniable, Poilievre is our Maple MAGA candidate even if Jenni Byrne and Candice Bergen have put away their MAGA hats for now.
Exactly!
So, does the crowd comes from all of the Edmonton area, or do they come from thousand of kilometres from small town villages PP wouldn't even care to come visit for five minutes? In a big country like Canada, the crowd mass is just a drop in the ocean, as they are spreaded from far away, as most of them are stuck with their safeblue riding voting poll, and not to snatch urban ridings.