Ford has positioned himself smartly as the candidate versus the other four people. Rossi, Thomson, Smitherman and Pantalone occupy the centre-right to the centre-left (in that order), and all of them are smart enough to do the job in non-disastrous ways. Unfortunately, since doing the job in a non-disastrous way requires them to answer a lot of things the same way, there’s a lot of same-old same-old. Ford is a stupid jackass, but being a stupid jackass unfortunately works out for him, because he’s the pick of everybody who wants to vote for his stupid jackass policies, and the rest of Toronto has to pick from four different people. If Ford wins this election—and he might—it’s going to be because the non-Ford vote will be split four ways. With that sort of split, Ford can win the mayorship with maybe a quarter of the vote, tops.
If one of Rossi/Smitherman/Pantalone/Thomson doesn’t start to pull away from the pack soon, Ford will win. And the pack is really the only reason why.
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