Pierre Poilievre is boasting about his rallies. But does size indicate success?

At a press conference in Edmonton on Tuesday, it was Pierre Poilievre who decided to ask the media a couple of questions, specifically about the size of the crowd in its rally in the city the previous night.

Before a Globe and Mail Reporter could ask him the question, if the size of his manifestations mattered, Pailievre was asking how he liked his campaign event.

He has asked the journalists before, in other events that have attracted thousands of people.

This time, in reference to Edmonton’s event that the campaign said he could have attracted about 15,000 people, the conservative leader also asked when it was the last time Canada had such a large demonstration.

“I think having 10 to 15,000 people in a political rally, this is a movement as we have never seen because people want to change,” said Poilievre. “They want to put our country first to vary.”

Pailievre’s comments about his manifestations, apparently, are to indicate the impulse of his campaign, despite the surveys that shows the conservatives who follow the liberals.

‘It is not a good measure of political support’: analyst

But the size of a political rally may not be a large -scale or predictive support of electoral success, some analysts say.

“Crowd sizes are not a good measure of political support,” said Nathaniel Rakich, former senior election analyst of the now missing political analysis website Fivethirtyeight.

The surveys, Rakich said, are really the best indicator of how he is going to a campaign.

“The surveys are scientific. They take a representative sample of the population and measure support between that. Crowd sizes are not scientific,” he said.

Rakich said there are some recent data that question the value of the sizes of the crowd as a measure of support for candidates.

The Crowd Consortium (CCC), a joint project of the Harvard Kennedy school and the University of Connecticut, gathered data on US political crowds. He compared the average size of the crowds in demonstrations with the then republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

Despite his displacing otherwise, Trump’s crowds were actually much smaller than Harris, according to CCC. Although Harris had a much shorter time to campaign, CCC analyzed the size of six of its manifestations, which he said from 10,000 to 15,000, for an average size of approximately 13,400.

For Trump, who had been campaigning longer than Harris, the CCC analyzed the crowd sizes of 28 of its manifestations. The average size of its crowd was approximately 5,600.

However, despite smaller crowd sizes, Trump won.

Rakich said Harris’s numbers could have been attributed to people who just wanted to learn about the unknown candidate. And he said that there could have been an urban-rural division, where Harris’s demonstrations tended to be in cities capable of attracting larger crowds.

“If you have never been in a national campaign, it is easy to believe that the size of the crowd in a rally has some influence on something,” Ian Brodie, head of personnel of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in response to a comment on the crowds of Poilievre.

Meanwhile, the political columnist Chantal Hébert said in X that since 1979, Pierre Trudeau spoke with around 20,000 people in a rally in the Maple Leaf de Toronto gardens, only a few weeks before his liberals lost to Joe Clark’s progressive conservatives.

Rakich said that it is certainly not bad to have great crowds; They can create good narratives of media and fundraising opportunities.

“But the point is that it is not decisive. If you have someone who leads for 10 points in the surveys, it would be a great discomfort for that candidate to lose because the surveys are scientific and the surveys are not lost so much,” he said.

“It would not be unusual for the candidate with the largest crowd size loses.”

People who do not attend the demonstrations ‘end up deciding the elections’

Éric Grenier, survey analyst and elections written by the writing bulletin and directs the CBC survey tracker, said that conservative crowd sizes show the strength and skills of the organization, and that the Poilievre base is motivated and enthusiastic.

“That’s it,” he said. “They are the people who do not attend demonstrations that end up deciding the elections.”

Look: Pailievre is asked if the rally size is important:

Pailievre wonders if rally ‘size matters’

The conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who speaks from Edmonton on the 17th of the electoral campaign, answers a question in the world and sends by mail about whether the size of its manifestations is important, and if his comments on the “mafia of the alarm clock” and the discouraging of the CBC are expanding support for liberals.

Grenier said that adding all people in Poilievre campaign manifestations would be equivalent to approximately one percent of all who will vote for conservatives.

“The fact that one percent of conservative voters will go to demonstrations and 0.5 percent will go to liberal manifestations, it doesn’t really tell me much,” he said.

Poilievre’s leadership career showed that he could excite a large strip of people and make them go to these events, Grenier said.

“It is not clear that those are people who are swing voters,” he said. “They are people who are excited to vote for Pierre Poilievre.”

As for the liberals, Grenier said that it is not clear if his campaign is making the logistics effort to attract thousands of people to their manifestations.

“[In] part because they could not be able to do it. But they could not be trying either, “he said.

“These are not just organic things in which Pierre Poilievre appears in a field and people are simply migrating there.”