Kyla Ronellenfitsch on the Conservatives' brand problem
Or, how I had it all wrong on the CPC's core brand strengths...
Three weeks ago I posted a short note here on Substack, sharing that on Kyla Ronellenfitsch’s polling was an eye-opener for me. I said I’d been incredibly wrong about something I’d been arguing on Craft Politics for months — that cost of living was the one issue Conservatives still owned, and that the moment Canadians shifted off Trump and back to the kitchen table, the polls would start to move toward Pierre Poilievre, or at least to the Conservative Party of Canada.
Turns out, I had it (mostly) wrong.
This week I had Kyla on the podcast to walk me through exactly how the data tells the opposite story of the one I had been pushing. What follows is what I took from our conversation, organized in a similar pattern to how we broke it down on the pod.
What I had right: cost of living is indeed a top issue.
It’s the dominant concern for two-thirds of Canadians. It has been since well before the election, and it’s holding steady. Kyla’s tracked it across four polling waves: 59% salience on election eve, 69% in November, 66% in January, 67% now. That part of my hypothesis was fine. If anything, the issue has stayed more salient than I’d have predicted in a Trump-saturated news cycle.
So far so good.
What I had wrong, first: the Conservatives no longer own this issue.
This is the one that genuinely surprised me when Kyla first shared her data in April. For forty years — from Mulroney through Harper through every subsequent leader — the Conservative Party of Canada has held a structural brand advantage on economic management. (Though, I’d argue the Chretien/Martin Liberals were a notable anomaly in this period). Point is, we assume the Tories have the stronger brand when it comes to economic issues.
It is no longer there. At least, on pocket-book issues, which is where I thought the CPC would have a long and enduring advantage.
When Kyla A/B tested party brand against leader brand on managing the cost of living, she found the Liberals leading the Conservatives by five points at the party level. At the leader level, Carney beats Poilievre 40 to 31 — a nine-point gap, with another 13% saying there’d be no difference and 16% unsure. There is no plausible read of those numbers in which the Conservative Party still owns this issue.
Kyla called the +5 number “bluntly, a disaster for the CPC team,” and on the show she walked through why. If a Conservative party can’t win on the economic argument, what’s its argument? You’re left with secondary issues — crime, immigration, identity — and at least so far, none of those is a Conservative platform that performs at scale in this moment. And she’s right — I certainly have a hard time seeing a path to victory for the Conservative Party if it doesn’t win on pocketbook and economic issues. Safety and immigration along won’t cut it.
What I had wrong, second: this isn’t new.
I’d been telling myself the cost of living lead was a recent Carney-effect phenomenon, and that the underlying brand would reassert itself when the news cycle settled down. Turns out the lead isn’t recent and the underlying brand isn’t reasserting itself.
Kyla’s been tracking the head-to-head on cost of living for over a year. From immediately after the election through now, the split has been consistent — roughly 60-40 in Carney’s favour when forced into a binary choice, even before adding the “no difference” option that softens the gap. A year is long enough that “Carney effect” is no longer a satisfying explanation. Something more durable is happening.
Part of it is the Liberal Party brand recovering from where it was at the depths of late-Trudeau (43% favourable now, against a much weaker number 15 months ago). Part of it is Carney himself outperforming his party. But the most useful framing I took from the conversation was Kyla’s own:
Carney is more popular than the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party is more popular than the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party is more popular than Pierre Poilievre.
Which, when we zoom out, has been the case for at least a year now. The public opinion environment is more calcified than I first realized.
What I had wrong, third: the young voter coalition was always softer than the headlines suggested.
The bigger pundit-class story over the last 18 months has been that Pierre Poilievre brought a generation of young voters into the Conservative coalition — that the Rogan-style media diet, the housing message, the change-versus-status-quo frame had unlocked a structural shift to the right among young Canadians, especially young men. I’d been carrying that assumption around without examining it.
Kyla has dismantled this narrative:
In September 2024, the Conservatives led the Liberals among young men by 35 points. As of January, that lead was 5.
Among young women, the Liberals have taken an 11-point lead, but most of that gain came from NDP collapse, not Conservative weakness.
And another interesting finding from her study of more than 2,000 young Canadians: 44% of them have favourable or neutral views of both Carney and Poilievre. That seems like a very malleable cohort of the electorate.
Which means the original Conservative gain among young voters wasn’t really a Conservative gain. It was a Trudeau-fatigue exit. Young voters were leaving the status quo, and the Conservative Party happened to be the only obvious place to go, especially with a leader that was saying all the right things in YouTube. When the status quo changed, they left again. It’s the same cognitive trap as the cost of living one — narrative ossified during peak Trudeau, never updated when the underlying conditions moved.
So what does this mean.
Three things, I think.
One: the next eighteen months are being underwritten by a Carney brand that may or may not transfer to the Liberal Party. Kyla’s “single number to watch” twelve months from now is whether Carney’s personal favourability and the Liberal advantage on cost of living move in lockstep, or whether the brand has actually transferred. If they move together, the Liberal lead is fragile — pull Carney out and you’d expect the Liberal advantage to come with him. If they diverge, with the Liberal Party advantage on the economy holding even as Carney’s personal numbers soften, then the Conservative Party has a much harder problem than it currently believes it has.
Two: the Conservative rebrand can’t work the way it’s currently designed to. Pierre Poilievre is rebranding against a sitting Prime Minister who is also rebranding, in roughly the same direction, with more institutional credibility and a head start. The “softer side” version of Poilievre that started showing up a few weeks ago has snapped back to attack mode. The rebrand needs to fix something deeper than tone — the underlying perception captured in Kyla’s November leadership audit, where the most commonly held view of Poilievre among non-polarized voters was “scary.” Until the floor of that perception lifts, the ceiling of any rebrand is capped.
Three: the strategic playbook I’d been running in my head — cost of living comes back, Trump fades, Conservatives recover — was a playbook for a public opinion environment that exists, but not in Poilievre’s favour. The electorate that exists now wants stability. Carney has — credit where it’s due — governed roughly the way he campaigned, and voters have rewarded him with patience.