[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto's Civic Election"

[rfmcdonald]

Livejournaler jsburbidge wrote an interesting post on the prospects of the major candidates in Toronto's mayoral election later this year. John Tory might actually get elected.

First, even with the latest Forum poll, it's not really clear whether John Tory has a decided lead or not. Forum adjusts its polls for likely voters, and the current rolling average calculations at ThreeHundredEight.com show Chow's "recent high" overlapping with Tory's "recent low" (31% as opposed to 28%). In other words, they're still in competition within the margin of error.

Still, Tory's weighted average is 33.9% and Chow's is 29.1%. I think it's fair to say that if trends continue as they have been Chow will be in trouble.

You can see from a breakdown in a recent poll as to why Chow has a bit of a dilemma. She has strong support (naturally) from the NDP, but also the largest block of Liberal support. If her aim is to increase her overall share of the vote, she can do one of two things -- try to peel away more Liberal - identifiers (or equivalent voters who don't identify as Liberals but whose views are generally more middle-of-the-road), or come out swinging strongly in a bid for popular support among more disaffected voters.

In a "normal" election, the latter might make sense: there are more voters who will identify with her immigrant experience and early background than with Tory's background as a scion of Tory, Tory, Deslauriers and Binnington (as it was when I was in Law School, now Torys LLP). Unfortunately, many of these potential voters are in the disaffected category on which Rob Ford has an even stronger lock -- as a number of analyses have pointed out, Ford's populist base isn't necessarily all conservative, and certainly his strength among the young and in the black community points to a strength based in pure populism. (Serious conservatives of any sort have probably given up on Ford because even if he were to win, the last several years have shown that he can't work well enough with others to make things happen; better to back a less radical conservative withe better coalition-building skills.) So Chow's growth prospects depend on not scaring off centrist voters.

That's why her campaign is so bland. She's safe pointing out her own background, but she's presenting as someone pushing minor adjustments to the system rather than major overhauls. Soknacki, who is a self-declared small-c conservative, has more radical positions than she does.

In contrast the same breakdown shows why Tory's campaign is so much closer to the fiscal position of the city government over the past four years than his background in the CivicAction Alliance might lead one to expect: if Chow basically occupies the left and centre left of the spectrum, he has little to gain from trying to compete with her there, given his background and history. Campaigning to the right is his obvious strategy.