Come on, adma.
I agree with your analysis on most other ridings, but I think you're stretching it here.
Trudeau beat Anne L-D by a 2 to 1 margin (& by 13,000 votes!), the biggest margin of victory seen in Papineau since 2000.
The NDP poll was clearly bogus and was not backed up by any other evidence.
And in the end, the BQ vote in Papineau shifted to Trudeau, not the NDP. Another irony.
Trudeau picked up 10,000 votes in Papineau (26,000 votes in 2015 vs. 16,000 in 2011). That means he didn't just win the multicutural neighbourhoods in Parc-Extension & St. Michel -- he picked up Francophone votes from within Villeray.
Uh, if you noticed, I was *not* talking about the final result. In fact, I specified: "had Mulcair maintained his mid-election "landslide advantage" in Quebec." That is, when the NDP was soaring to provincewide numbers equal to if not beyond 2011; i.e. if you're to dismiss said poll as "bogus", you might as well do likewise with just about every other poll at that moment.
You're addressing the October 19 "35.7% Liberal to 25.4% NDP" Quebec reality. I'm addressing the early-to-mid-September situation which, at its Sep 9 Eric "Mr. Liberal Bias" Grenier Poll Tracker apogee, saw the NDP at 48.4% to the Libs' 19.8%.
Under that circumstance, and taking a more nuanced and multilayered reading of the final result, it's actually quite easy indeed to come to the conclusion that the CROP poll *wasn't* all that off the mark--at that moment.
And also under that circumstance: yes, give Justin due credit for pushing back that possibly-very-real-at-the-moment threat. Better that than smugly boasting that there was never any such "very real threat" in the first place. Look: he won his previous two elections by pushing back threats--why deny it now? (In fact, in the past I've been a rather ironic naysayer vs NDP partisans who wanted to make the most of Justin's "vulnerability" because of his 2011 share, noting that he lost far less ground than just about every other Liberal incumbent in Quebec that year. However, in light of the momentarily-stratospheric Mulcair QC polling + the ALD star candidacy vs Justin, I *did* see the plausibility of his vulnerability at the time the CROP poll came out.)
Yes, Justin got 52% vs ALD's 26%. However, in nearby Honore-Mercier, Pablo Rodriguez managed *56.5%* vs *16.4%* for the NDPer who defeated him in 2011. (Other Grits landslide-defeating NDP incumbents of note: 55% vs 21.5 in Dorval-Lachine-LaSalle, 58.7% vs third-place 16.5% in Pierrefonds-Dollard.)