Analysis

Newfoundland and Labrador post election analysis

Oct 14, 2025

Despite most recent polls showing a significant Liberal lead, our poll predicted a Progressive Conservative victory, which ended up materializing on election day. 

When reweighted to account for only decided voters, our poll predicted a PC vote total of 48%. The final PC vote total came out at 44%, resulting in a 4% difference from our poll, well within the 9.22% margin of error and outperforming most other pollsters in terms of accurately predicting PC support. Our poll did significantly underrepresent the Liberal party vote count, with a predicted total of 31.1% and final total of 43.5%. Part of this difference may be attributed to strategic voting on the part of NDP voters, who polled at 16.4% in our survey, but received 8.3% of the vote on election day. The NDP largely underperformed all pre-election polls, likely due to strategic voting patterns seen in other elections across Canada, where NDP voters have chosen to support the Liberal candidate in close races. The NDP did pick up a new seat with their victory in St. John's East-Quidi Vidi, which our model accurately predicted. 

Results from our full poll indicate that the 19.5% of voters who considered themselves undecided in our survey largely supported the Liberals on election day, with the Progressive Conservatives seeing a 5% gain from undecided voters, while the Liberals saw a 14% gain.

While the Progressive Conservatives underperformed our popular vote prediction, their election night result outperformed our seat count predictions, securing a majority government, whereas we had predicted a minority. 

Ultimately, our prediction model accurately called 80% of riding outcomes. The map below displays ridings which were called correctly in green, and ones which were called incorrectly in red.