The past year and a half has been unusually eventful in British Columbia politics: multiple floor crossings in the legislature, a major party rebrand, and dramatic movement in public opinion polls. In fact, polling from multiple sources confirms that, with only weeks to go before the fall campaign for the provincial election kicks off, BC politics may be undergoing a massive generational realignment.
The chart below depicts two BC polls from the Vancouver-based polling firm Research Co., fielded fourteen months apart. On top, the May 2023 poll was fielded a few weeks after the British Columbia Liberal Party officially changed its name to BC United, in part to distance itself from perceived federal Liberal connections and to rejuvenate its image before the 2024 election. Across the province, David Eby’s New Democratic Party led the field (as it had done in every poll since the NDP’s re-election in 2020) with 46 percent of province-wide support, thirteen points ahead of the newly rebranded BC United. The Greens took third place with 16 percent.
