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

Mark Gollom · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 09, 2025 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: April 9

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

Before a Globe and Mail reporter was able to ask her question — whether the size of his rallies matter — Poilievre was inquiring to her how she liked his campaign event.

He has asked reporters this question before, at other events that have drawn thousands of people. 

This time, in reference to the Edmonton event which the campaign said may have drawn around 15,000 people, the Conservative leader also asked when was the last time Canada had a rally that big.

“I think to have 10 to 15,000 people at one political rally, this is a movement like we’ve never seen because people want change,” Poilievre said. “They want to put our country first for a change.”

Poilievre’s comments about his rallies, it seems, are to indicate his campaign’s momentum, despite polling that shows the Conservatives trailing the Liberals.

‘Not a good measure of political support’: Analyst

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

“Crowd sizes are not a good measure of political support,” said Nathaniel Rakich, the former senior elections analyst with the now-defunct political analysis website FiveThirtyEight.

Polls, Rakich said, really are the best indicator of how a campaign is faring.

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

Rakich said there is some recent data that calls into question the value of crowd sizes as a measure of candidate support.

The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, collected data on U.S. political crowds. It compared the average size of the crowds at rallies featuring then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

Despite his boasts to the contrary, Trump’s crowds were actually much smaller than Harris’s, according to CCC. Although Harris had a much shorter time to campaign, CCC looked at the size of six of her rallies, which it said ranged from 10,000 to 15,000, for an average size of about 13,400.

 For Trump, who had been campaigning longer than Harris, the CCC looked at the crowd sizes of 28 of his rallies. His average crowd size was about 5,600.

Yet despite the smaller crowd sizes, Trump won.

Rakich said Harris’s numbers could have been attributed to people just wanting to learn about the unknown candidate. And he said there may have been an urban-rural divide, where Harris’s rallies tended to be in cities able to draw larger crowds.

“If you’ve never been on a national campaign, it’s easy to believe that crowd size at a rally has any influence over anything,” Ian Brodie, who was chief of staff to former prime minister Stephen Harper, recently tweeted in response to a comment about Poilievre’s crowds.

Meanwhile, political columnist Chantal Hébert pointed out on X that as far back as 1979, Pierre Trudeau spoke to around 20,000 people at a rally at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, just a few weeks before his Liberals would lose to Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives.

Rakich said it’s certainly not bad to have big crowds; they can create good media narratives and fundraising opportunities.

“But the point is, it’s not determinative. If you have someone who’s leading by 10 points in the polls, it would be a huge upset for that candidate to lose because the polls are scientific and polls don’t miss by that much,” he said.

“It wouldn’t be unusual for the candidate with the bigger crowd sizes to lose.”

People who don’t attend rallies ‘end up deciding elections’

Éric Grenier, a polls and elections analyst who writes The Writ newsletter and runs CBC’s Poll Tracker, said Conservative crowd sizes do show the organization’s strength and skills, and that Poilievre’s base is motivated and enthusiastic.

“That’s about it,” he said. “It’s the people that don’t attend rallies who end up deciding elections.”

WATCH: Poilievre is asked if rally size matters: 

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, speaking from Edmonton on Day 17 of the election campaign, responds to a question from the Globe and Mail about whether the size of his rallies matters, and whether his comments about the ‘woke mob’ and defunding the CBC is broadening support for the Liberals.

Grenier said adding up all the people at Poilievre’s campaign rallies would amount to about one per cent of everybody who is going to vote for the Conservatives.

“The fact that one per cent of Conservative voters will go to the rallies and 0.5 per cent will go to Liberal rallies doesn’t really say that much to me,” he said.

Poilievre’s leadership race showed he could excite a big swath of people and get them to go to these events, Grenier said.

“It’s not clear that those are people that are swing voters,” he said. “They’re people who are enthused to vote for Pierre Poilievre.”

As for the Liberals, Grenier said it’s not clear whether their campaign is putting in the logistical effort to attract thousands of people to their rallies.

“[In] part because they might not be able to do it. But they also might not be trying,” he said.

“These are not just organic things where Pierre Poilievre is showing up in a field and people are just migrating there.”