Headline Findings
1. Liberals lead in Waterloo Region in spring, federally and provincially. Federally, 28% of all respondents and 49% of all decided respondents said they would vote Liberal. The latter number is an increase of 11 percentage points over the Liberals’ 2019 results in Waterloo Region.
2. Provincially, the Liberals lead, but the the gap was much smaller. 22% of all respondents said they would support the Liberals compared to 18% for the PCs. This rose to 33% for decided voters for the Liberals and 29% for the PCs. This gap is just within the study’s margin of error
3. Share of 2019 Liberal voters who approved of Justin Trudeau’s handling of the pandemic was 13 percentage points higher than the share of 2018 PC voters who of Doug Ford’s handling of the pandemic (73% versus 60%) (see Tables 2 and 4). Trudeau had better evaluations from his most recent voters than Ford did.
4. Controlling for past federal and provincial votes, approval of handling the pandemic was a significant predictor of whether a voter would vote for both parties (see Tables 5, 6)
5. Conclusion: The Trudeau government’s handling of the pandemic helped its political standings and the Ford government’s handling of the pandemic hurt its chances in Waterloo Region.
6. Waterloo Region is an important bellwether set of ridings in Ontario. Table 8 and 9 show the number of ridings since 2003 in provincial and general elections that have returned members whose party formed the government..
Keywords: Survey, Waterloo Region, Federal Vote Intention
Suggested Citation: Kiss, Simon, Perrella, Andrea and Piscitelli, Anthony (2021). “Summary of Waterloo Region Vote Intention, Spring 2021.” Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy. Waterloo, Canada