Lewis to win NDP Leadership with 56% in First Round

(Disclosure: I’m not an NDP member, and I’m not working for or supporting any campaign in the leadership race.)

The NDP leadership race doesn’t end until March 29th, but the result is already clear: Avi Lewis will win the contest with more than double the support of his closest competitor, Heather McPherson.

Based on donation statistics released by Elections Canada yesterday, the race will be decided in the first round of voting, and will look something like this:

Candidate	Vote %
LEWIS, Avi	55.5%
McPHERSON, Heather	21.1%
ASHTON, Rob	10.7%
JOHNSTON, Tanille	8.5%
McQUAIL, Tony	4.3%

Despite media coverage that has portrayed this as a two-way or three-way race, the reality is that it was never close. Lewis had already achieved double the support of McPherson by mid-October, and has been steadily pulling away from the pack ever since.

How reliable are projections based on donations?

I’ve been projecting leadership races for ten years (for example: 2025 Liberals, 2022 Greens, 2020 Greens), and the number of donations a contestant receives has always been the strongest predictor of their final vote performance—more accurate than polling the members or counting endorsements.

(To their credit, polling companies seem to agree: “leadership races are largely contests to see who can sign up the most new members and mobilize them to vote”, says North Poll Strategies founder Alex Kohut; “Leadership races … are decided by how many memberships candidates sell”, say Pollara Strategic Insights.)

Simply put, leadership races are not contests of ideas or personality. They’re contests of recruitment and mobilization. The strongest campaign team will mobilize the most people to vote—but before it does that, it will also have convinced the most people to donate. That’s why donations predict votes.

What about timing? Can we really make an accurate projection two-and-a-half weeks before the contest ends? Yes, for several reasons.

First, the deadline to sign up new members was January 28th, so the opportunity to change the outcome by bringing new communities of voters into the party has passed. Second, all campaigns have had access to the membership list for several months, and will have already reached out to members multiple times and gathered most of their potential support. And finally, members who make their decision late in the contest tend to mirror the preferences of those who decided earlier, rather than changing the outcome.

In fact, donations are so reliable a predictor that I could have published a projection in January, using an earlier set of Elections Canada data (the NDP’s fourth-quarter financial return), and it would have looked like this: Lewis 50%, McPherson 20%, Ashton 11%, Johnston 12%, and McQuail 6%. Not much different, is it? Early data tends to understate front-runners, and it can be hard to know by how much, which is why I prefer to use the interim campaign return. But even by January, we can already see a clear signal that Lewis will win with more than double McPherson’s support.

What’s Next?

The official outcome will be announced on March 29th. (If you’re an NDP supporter, you may want to skip what will likely be a very boring two-and-a-half weeks.)

At that time, the conversation will turn to asking what a Lewis win means for the NDP. Supporters are desperate for a rebound from the party’s 2025 election disappointment, but in my view, the supposed “collapse” of the NDP was a temporary swing exaggerated by our voting system, rather than a symptom of internal crisis. Those storm clouds will blow over in due time. (And, much like economic storms, the person in charge when the sun starts shining will get the credit.)

The real question is not whether Lewis can be a competent leader, but whether he intends to be a transformative one. An energetic performance from the NDP’s traditional songbook will comfort the membership, bring in funds, and restore the party to the third-place standing it’s accustomed to.

To form the opposition again—or, dare I say it, to form government—would require change on a more profound level than any of the candidates in this race, or any of the critics outside it, have promised. But that’s a topic for another day. ●