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

He’s achieved something Conservatives failed to do for years: win young voters

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.

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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........

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