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Toronto's Civic Election
Aug. 13th, 2014 11:52 amIt's about two and a half months left before the civic election, and things are beginning to become clearer.
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.
Second, Both Soknacki and Stintz are stuck in the doldrums. It may make some sense for Soknacki to stay in the race until the end -- Soknacki has nothing to lose - he has no council seat - and everything to gain as a future candidate by continuing to roll out well-thought-out platform planks. His stature would probably be improved if he were to hold on to the end rather than dropping out. Stintz, on the other hand, has real problems. She has no real policy platform other than Rob Ford's fiscal policies without his personality problems; her recent gestures have been short-term poorly-thought-out gestures to curry favour with the same sort of people who wanted the end of the VRT (I mean, using the "surplus" from the past year on TTC to reduce fares rather than, say, helping to address the large list up upcoming expenses, many of which are "below the line" as far as funding is concerned?). If she loses the race, she has no effective political platform left. Her interests would be best served by gracefully accepting an almost certain defeat, pulling out of the mayoral race, and running again for her council seat.
If Stintz were to drop out of the race, most of her support would pretty well have to go to Tory, and would probably give him a lock on the election.
Third, Ford is clearly also in a losing position. He shows no upward movement at all above his 27% support. He is, basically, nobody's second choice. If current numbers hold up, either Tory or Chow or both will comfortably defeat him: you can't win an essentially three-way race with 27% of the vote, unless you have remarkably high turnout and your opponents have low turnout -- and Ford's support (young, poorly educated, black) is concentrated in the low-turnout area while Tory's (well-off, older) and Chow's (better-educated) skew towards better turnout. In addition, if the polls look at all close, there are a lot of voters who will vote for the front-runner to ensure that Ford does not get in.
That's just on the numbers. It's not helped by the fact that he's campaigning on policies he's already failed at getting through council (burying the Eglinton LRT, for example), has a completely inexperienced campaign manager who's being sued for libel, and can't keep his mouth shut when he wants to say stupid things. He distorts things in a transparently problematic manner[1], shows up at work only sporadically, is embroiled in conflict-of-interest investigations again, and is so unable to see the selection bias in people coming up to him and asking for selfies that he really thinks his support is enough to let him win. (Shades of Nixon's "silent majority", or for that matter "the lurkers support me in e-mail".)
[1]For the record, I don't think that Ford is lying in most of this sort of rhetoric so much as genuinely believes what he says. An alternate version of recent history has established itself in his mind. (No, the city was not on the edge of the fiscal abyss when he came to office; the studies his own administration commissioned showed that it was already tightly run and that problems were on the revenue rather than the spending side; but one can't convince him of that.). I also suspect that his degree of innumeracy is such that beyond a given level everything is just big numbers to him: even though the scale of money spent on Eglinton Connects and burying the LRT are incommensurate, I'm sure he really thinks that it would make a significant difference, just as he thought that unnecessary photocopying was a burden on the city budget.
The near future wiggle room for major initiatives in the city is likely to be small, no matter who wins. Given the costs associated with the TTC even before looking at expanding subways or LRTs, the TCHC repairs backlog, and the infrastructure maintenance costs which recent reports have indicated are going to come due soon, the next term is probably going to look pretty similar regardless of whether Chow or Tory wins (this would be even more true if Tory shifted more to the centre on CivicAction-type issues once in office): major decisions will be based on the willingness of the province (mainly) and the feds (to a secondary degree) to fund things.
I'm willing to make a provisional call: unless Rob Ford drops out for health or other reasons, or Chow increases the effectiveness of her campaign, or Tory stumbles -- and he has a history of doing so -- this is looking like a likely Tory victory.
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.
Second, Both Soknacki and Stintz are stuck in the doldrums. It may make some sense for Soknacki to stay in the race until the end -- Soknacki has nothing to lose - he has no council seat - and everything to gain as a future candidate by continuing to roll out well-thought-out platform planks. His stature would probably be improved if he were to hold on to the end rather than dropping out. Stintz, on the other hand, has real problems. She has no real policy platform other than Rob Ford's fiscal policies without his personality problems; her recent gestures have been short-term poorly-thought-out gestures to curry favour with the same sort of people who wanted the end of the VRT (I mean, using the "surplus" from the past year on TTC to reduce fares rather than, say, helping to address the large list up upcoming expenses, many of which are "below the line" as far as funding is concerned?). If she loses the race, she has no effective political platform left. Her interests would be best served by gracefully accepting an almost certain defeat, pulling out of the mayoral race, and running again for her council seat.
If Stintz were to drop out of the race, most of her support would pretty well have to go to Tory, and would probably give him a lock on the election.
Third, Ford is clearly also in a losing position. He shows no upward movement at all above his 27% support. He is, basically, nobody's second choice. If current numbers hold up, either Tory or Chow or both will comfortably defeat him: you can't win an essentially three-way race with 27% of the vote, unless you have remarkably high turnout and your opponents have low turnout -- and Ford's support (young, poorly educated, black) is concentrated in the low-turnout area while Tory's (well-off, older) and Chow's (better-educated) skew towards better turnout. In addition, if the polls look at all close, there are a lot of voters who will vote for the front-runner to ensure that Ford does not get in.
That's just on the numbers. It's not helped by the fact that he's campaigning on policies he's already failed at getting through council (burying the Eglinton LRT, for example), has a completely inexperienced campaign manager who's being sued for libel, and can't keep his mouth shut when he wants to say stupid things. He distorts things in a transparently problematic manner[1], shows up at work only sporadically, is embroiled in conflict-of-interest investigations again, and is so unable to see the selection bias in people coming up to him and asking for selfies that he really thinks his support is enough to let him win. (Shades of Nixon's "silent majority", or for that matter "the lurkers support me in e-mail".)
[1]For the record, I don't think that Ford is lying in most of this sort of rhetoric so much as genuinely believes what he says. An alternate version of recent history has established itself in his mind. (No, the city was not on the edge of the fiscal abyss when he came to office; the studies his own administration commissioned showed that it was already tightly run and that problems were on the revenue rather than the spending side; but one can't convince him of that.). I also suspect that his degree of innumeracy is such that beyond a given level everything is just big numbers to him: even though the scale of money spent on Eglinton Connects and burying the LRT are incommensurate, I'm sure he really thinks that it would make a significant difference, just as he thought that unnecessary photocopying was a burden on the city budget.
The near future wiggle room for major initiatives in the city is likely to be small, no matter who wins. Given the costs associated with the TTC even before looking at expanding subways or LRTs, the TCHC repairs backlog, and the infrastructure maintenance costs which recent reports have indicated are going to come due soon, the next term is probably going to look pretty similar regardless of whether Chow or Tory wins (this would be even more true if Tory shifted more to the centre on CivicAction-type issues once in office): major decisions will be based on the willingness of the province (mainly) and the feds (to a secondary degree) to fund things.
I'm willing to make a provisional call: unless Rob Ford drops out for health or other reasons, or Chow increases the effectiveness of her campaign, or Tory stumbles -- and he has a history of doing so -- this is looking like a likely Tory victory.
