“In the opening weeks of the campaign, Smitherman used a conventional front runner’s strategy: He coasted along, saying little on policy, meeting few voters, in a bid to minimize mistakes and dodge the shots that come with being in the spotlight.

It proved to be a fatal mistake.

In this political climate such an approach carried a “giant political risk,” Liberal consultant Rob Silver said in November, when many Torontonians still expected a head-to-head showdown between Smitherman and John Tory.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Related: Radwanski: Smitherman has lost more than the mayor’s chair (Globe and Mail)

“George Smitherman’s ill-fated candidacy is the most obvious point of comparison, because in so many ways he’s re-enacting all the mistakes of Barbara Hall’s campaign – no surprise, as he was the author of her attempted come-back.”

Read the rest of the column here.

“Looking at the numbers, at least one trend is obvious. Of Nanos’s 1012 respondents, 558 were over 50 years old and 320 of those were over 60. Does this sample accurately represent the demographic makeup of Toronto’s voters? Will half the voters in the election be over 50? It’s difficult to provide an answer to this question with any certainty (Toronto doesn’t seem to keep easy-to-access stats on the demographics of its municipal elections), but it does seem very unlikely seeing as only about one quarter of Canadians are over 50. For over-50′s to constitute half the voting population, they would have to come out in droves compared to younger voters.”

Read the rest of the post here.

“As a point of historical comparison, this is precisely what happened to Barbara Hall in 2003. Early in the fall, she unconvincingly tacked right with her fiscal policies, and her support rapidly collapsed. Smitherman’s fate could well be similar: he’ll never out-do Ford, but his eagerness to try will alienate the centre-of-the-road voters he should be assiduously courting.

All of which explains why Joe Pantalone’s campaign manager John Laschinger enthusiastically calls the tax freeze pledge “a gamechanger.”

Read the rest of his column here.

Joe Pantalone

Electograph Score: 2.5/10 (-.5)

Poor Joe Pantalone—even with a high profile if unsurprising endorsement from NDP leader Jack Layton, he can’t seem to get ahead. In spite of being a seasoned city councillor who’s been in the public eye for decades, he’s now frequently—although not always—polling behind newbie candidate Sarah Thomson. Part of his problem is that rightly or wrongly he’s associated in the public mind with an alleged culture of waste and bad management at city hall that’s constantly being referenced by the other candidates.

Read the rest of the scores here.

“With Rob Ford’s ascent to front-runner status in the 2010 mayoral race, much is once again being made of the oppositional voting preferences of those who reside in old (urban) Toronto and what were once the suburbs that sprouted up around the core of the city. I say “what were once the suburbs” because post-amalgamation it makes little sense to use this terminology to describe areas like Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke.

But, forgetting this terminological inaccuracy, there’s compelling evidence — at the very least from a political perspective — to suggest that the old city and its former suburbs have never aligned ideologically.”

Read the rest of the post here.

“John Tory is a formidable fundraiser,” says John Matheson, who is working on Rocco Rossi’s campaign. “That money now, by definition, is free.”

How much there was, of course, can never be known. Contributors “tend to give it to people they like and if they don’t like anyone, they don’t give it,” observes former Ontario premier David Peterson. Other campaign veterans point out that many donors so far have been sitting on their wallets and purses.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Related: Candidates feel the Tory effect (National Post)

“There is a vacuum in the debate, and right now, Ford is filling it with anger.

So it’s no wonder the people who left Tory’s side in January are feeling out in the cold here in July. And it’s no wonder so many of them are at not-so-quiet work, trying to bring the reluctant candidate back into the fold.”

Read the rest of the article here.