Poilievre May Be Struggling Right Now, but the Kids Still Like Him

It’s already political legend. In 2025, Justin Trudeau stepped down as prime minister just as Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives cruised toward a massive majority government. Within weeks of Mark Carney taking the helm of the Liberals, the political landscape was transformed. By April, the Liberals had secured another mandate—a turnaround with virtually no precedent in Canada in terms of scale and timing, and one that few observers would have predicted at the start of the year. Yours truly included.

And yet, beneath that dramatic reversal, one crucial segment of the electorate didn’t budge for the Conservatives. Among voters aged eighteen to thirty-four—“young voters” for the purposes of this analysis—party support held firm after Trudeau’s exit and Carney’s arrival. It is the only major demographic group where the Conservatives truly weathered the massive 2025 shift in public opinion.

As shown above, the Conservative trend line at the start of 2025 sits roughly where it does today. There are some fluctuations—as always with subsamples—but the broader signal is clear: among young voters, Conservative support stayed high.

This relative strength is also a recent phenomenon. Looking back, the Conservatives were largely uncompetitive among younger voters throughout the leaderships of Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole. Using all available federal polls since the 2019 election, the pattern is consistent despite the noise: the CPC trailed both the Liberals and the New Democratic Party among young Canadians, often by wide margins.

A striking example came in August 2020. Just days after Erin O’Toole won the Conservative leadership, a Leger poll measured CPC support at only 21 percent among younger voters—a full nineteen points behind the NDP.

After the 2021 election, the gap narrowed only modestly. In the final Sunday update before Poilievre’s leadership victory (September 4, 2022), the averages among young Canadians stood at 29 percent for both the Liberals and the NDP and 24 percent for the Conservatives.

Then came Poilievre. The change was not instantaneous, but it was unmistakable. Through late 2022 and into 2023, Conservative support among young voters began to climb, while Liberal support softened. The NDP held relatively steady, though some erosion became visible over time.

In effect, a portion of younger Liberal voters appears to have migrated toward the Conservatives—a trend that persisted for nearly two years.

On Sunday, January 12, 2025—the first 338Canada update after Trudeau announced his resignation—Conservative support among young voters reached an average of 43 percent: nineteen points ahead of the NDP and twenty-four points ahead of the Liberals.

What followed in the spring of 2025 underscores just how unusual the electoral realignment was. Among older voters, Conservative support dropped sharply during the pre-campaign and writ periods, and the Liberals surged. Among younger voters, however, Conservative support remained comparatively stable.

In other words, the coalition that delivered victory to the Liberals in 2025 was not built on a uniform generational swing. Although the Liberals made gains across all age groups, their victory was driven disproportionately by older voters leaving the Conservatives—and by younger NDP voters consolidating behind Carney’s Liberals.

This brings us to the current debate within Conservative circles: Should Pierre Poilievre remain leader? The case against him is well known. He lost a substantial polling lead, squandered an election widely perceived as winnable, and one year later, continues to post personal approval numbers that often lag behind his party’s support.

But the case for him rests, in part, on numbers like these: the 2025 Conservatives gained twenty-five more seats than in 2021 and grew their vote total from 5.7 million votes in 2021 to 8.1 million votes in 2025. But just as importantly, they made—and largely held—significant gains among younger voters, a group that had eluded them for years. That is not a trivial achievement.

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Are Poilievre’s current numbers favourable? Not especially. At the beginning of April, the Nanos Research weekly tracker showed Poilievre trailing Carney in the preferred prime minister question by more than thirty points (55 percent to 23 percent). In March, the Angus Reid Institute found that 59 percent of Canadians view Poilievre unfavourably, compared to 34 percent favourable (a net minus twenty-five). Abacus Data’s numbers are less severe but still persistently negative (43 percent negative, 39 percent positive, a net minus four in Abacus’ latest) and well below Carney’s standing.

Still, one would be foolish to pretend we can predict where public opinion will go next—especially given, first, the dramatic shift we witnessed last year and, second, the broader uncertainty of the current political environment, thanks largely to the man in the White House.

If the Conservatives can maintain their footing among younger voters, while gradually rebuilding support among older Canadians—and if the NDP manages to claw back part of its younger base from the Liberals—the CPC could be assembling a more durable electoral coalition than the one Poilievre built from 2022 to 2025.

A big “if,” admittedly—but one that may define the next election.