There were all the parts of Pierre Poilievre in Monday’s election result.

There were the revved-up and frustrated young and middle-aged men responding to his call for change. There were also people who changed their political habits to stop him from becoming prime minister.

All those positives. All those negatives. Sometimes you have to wonder why Mr. Poilievre doesn’t do something about the negatives.

He lost a 27-point lead. He turned out the highest Conservative vote in decades. He lost his riding. He won enough seats to lay claim to keeping the Conservative leadership. He still has a lot of open wounds with other conservatives across the land.

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On Monday night, Mr. Poilievre made it clear he plans to stay at the helm of the Conservative Party, even though he ended up losing his Ottawa-area seat.

But he might want to tackle some of the negatives that made NDP and Bloc Québécois supporters line up behind the Liberals so he wouldn’t become prime minister. Some of them just seem gratuitous.

Sure, Mark Carney’s Liberals won because of Donald Trump’s trade war. But in reality they won because a plurality didn’t want Mr. Trump’s trade war and Mr. Poilievre as prime minister. And it’s not just because the Conservative Leader never ran a central bank.

There’s always been a double edge to Mr. Poilievre’s aggressive politics. He knows it. He’s always been willing to offend half the people if it wins the other half. Heck, in Canada’s multi-party system, he was willing to upset 60 if he won a solid 40. And his politics have usually been hyper-adversarial.

When he was an 18-year-old involved in Reform Party and Alberta Progressive Conservative politics at the University of Calgary – not the most inhospitable ground for conservatives – he took on the student union and sometimes fellow conservatives for not being conservative enough.

His 2022 Conservative leadership bid came with promises to tear up municipal red tape bureaucracy to encourage more homebuilding – a really shrewd approach to winning alienated 30-somethings mad at a system that has made housing unaffordable.

But he went on to call a lot of the country’s mayors incompetent, and though many of the mayors weren’t Conservatives, it promised to gratuitously antagonize a lot of folks in areas Conservatives might like to win.

He told business leaders not to bother coming to him with their problems when he’s prime minister. Then he rebuffed business leaders considering running for the Conservatives, deciding he didn’t need stars. It turned out that a little economic star-power might have helped him compete with Mr. Carney in a trade-war election.

None of that is about policy, or principles. It’s about an aggressive style that some see as strength and others see as unnerving or even frightening.

You’d think that part of a politician’s job description would be trying to win people over. Mr. Poilievre keeps on picking fights that don’t need to be fought.

There’s the petty feud with Ontario Premier Doug Ford and some of his team. It’s said that Mr. Poilievre doesn’t see Mr. Ford as Conservative enough and Mr. Ford’s campaign manager, Kory Teneycke, both criticized Mr. Poilievre’s campaign strategy and complained he ignored attempts to connect the two. Mr. Ford said that he hadn’t spoken to Mr. Poilievre until late March.

Last week, The Globe and Mail reported that when Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston said he didn’t plan to ask Mr. Poilievre to campaign with him in last year’s provincial election, Mr. Poilievre’s campaign manager and long-time alter-ego, Jenni Byrne, sent text messages to his aides warning that Mr. Poilievre would remember the snub.

Ms. Byrne, the other half of the all-controlling duo in Mr. Poilievre’s Conservative Party, has a reputation as someone who will vow retribution to those who cross her but that’s part and parcel of Mr. Poilievre’s ways. He didn’t just attack Jean Charest in the leadership race, he excoriated the former Quebec premier and made him unwelcome in the party.

Part of that is strategy. Mr. Poilievre and Ms. Byrne are clearly out to put together a fired up 40-per-cent that shows up to vote. They’re not trying to build a big tent party.

On Monday, they succeeded, pulling 41.3 per cent of the vote. That was impressive. It’s just that Mr. Poilievre’s negatives played a part in motivating the 43.7 per cent who voted for the other guy.