Nine months after falling definitively short in the 2025 federal election, Pierre Poilievre is facing a mandatory leadership review at this weekend’s Conservative Party convention.

By all accounts, he’s likely to cruise through the review, since he enjoys strong support among Conservative Party members.

That support extends to the broader voting coalition Poilievre has assembled, which continues to stand behind his leadership for the most part. Recent polling suggests that more than three quarters of Conservative voters view him as doing an “excellent” job.

The problem for Poilievre and the party, however, is that among those who did not vote Conservative, the view is starkly different. In that same recent Abacus poll, 62 per cent of non-Conservative voters reported he’s doing a “poor” or “very poor” job.

In a sense, Poilievre is the most successful unsuccessful leader in Canadian politics.

If you count by share of the vote, Poilievre led the party to its best showing in nearly 40 years. Brian Mulroney was the last leader of a Conservative party to crack 40 per cent of the vote share across the country. He also got the party to its best share of seats since Stephen Harper’s lone majority victory in 2011.

Poilievre managed to pull together, and even expand, the coalition of........

© The Conversation