If voter turnout ticks up only a bit from its historic lows, it upends projections of how this election will go

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First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter that throughout the 2025 election will be a daily digest of campaign goings-on, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

One week into the 2025 election, the Liberals under Mark Carney are dominating every typical indicator of electoral success.

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Every poll now has the Liberals in the lead; a Sunday release by Liaison Strategies had them with a five-point lead. And even the betting markets have swung hard for the Liberals: A Polymarket wager for “next prime minister of Canada after the election?” is favouring Carney at 66 per cent.

But there’s one overlooked factor that could flip all of this on its head: voter turnout.

In the 2021 federal election, voter turnout was the sixth lowest in Canadian history. Just 62.6 per cent of eligible voters ended up casting a ballot; meaning there were 7.6 million Canadians who could have voted, but chose not to.

If only a relatively small number of those 7.6 million change their mind about voting in the 2025 election, it could upend the usual electoral metrics for how this is supposed to go.

In just the last year, there have been two major national elections that were largely decided by non-voters.

In July, the U.K. saw the Labour Party under Keir Starmer secure victory thanks to a 24-year low in voter turnout. And in the U.S., the opposite happened in November: Donald Trump won a second presidential term due in part to his ability to draw non-voters to the polls.

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The U.K. example is particularly notable because the Labour Party received fewer raw ballots than it had in 2019, an election the party had lost to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. The July election saw Labour pull in........

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