Mayoral hopefuls face tough decision as deadline looms: Should they stay or should they go
It's almost certain several of the 15 candidates will drop out before next Wednesday
When the doors slam shut at the city clerk's office on Wednesday evening, Winnipeg's mayoral ballot will be set in stone.
Right now, there are 15 candidates. Come Wednesday, there are bound to be fewer.
In every election, a handful of registered candidates don't meet the deadline to submit their nomination papers.
Usually, this is the result of a candidate's inability to obtain the signatures of 250 people who appear on the city's voter list. This happened in 2010 to filmmaker Ed Ackerman and in 2014 to funeral-home director Mike Vogiatzakis to name a couple of mayoral hopefuls who complained after they failed to complete the nomination process.
This year, it's fair to expect some candidates to simply peace out, either by choosing not to submit their nomination papers by the Tuesday afternoon deadline or by bowing out altogether before the withdrawal deadline on Wednesday.
With the clock ticking, almost every candidate will question whether they wish to continue.
Most rational politicians will use arithmetic to determine their decision. For others, the choice will come down to ego, experience or resolve.
Among the 15 candidates currently registered to run, it's fair to say eight to 10 have been running something resembling a conventional mayoral campaign.
Full-blown campaigns find candidates making promises and marketing themselves in some manner, using both traditional and social media. In order to win, they have to meet as many people as possible, either at public events or by knocking on doors.
They have to identify friendly voters in a systematic manner for the purpose of later ensuring those voters make it to a ballot box in October. They also have to amass and organize enough volunteers to ensure all this campaign machinery hums along.
They have to do all this without the help of the political party structures and voter lists that make campaigns possible for provincial and federal election candidates.
If that sounds immensely difficult, it is. Candidates also have to possess a considerable amount of mental, emotional and physical endurance to survive a campaign.
Benchmark figure: 38% of the popular vote
Given the arduous nature of campaigning, it's likely not all the current contenders in Winnipeg's very crowded 2022 mayoral race will continue on, once they consider the arithmetic involved.
Candidates hoping to swing a victory on Oct. 26 through a 15-way split will almost certainly find themselves disappointed. In crowded mayoral races, such as this one, voters tend to coalesce around a handful a candidates they perceive to be frontrunners.
In Winnipeg's 17-candidate mayoral race in 1992, the four most popular candidates amassed 97 per cent of the vote. In a 35-candidate Toronto mayoral race in 2018, the top two candidates received 87 per cent of the vote.
As well, there is no modern precedent for a candidate winning a Winnipeg election with anything less than a third of the popular vote.
Over the past 60 years, the lowest proportion of the popular vote amassed by a winning mayoral candidate in this city was 38.3 per cent, which is what Susan Thompson claimed in 1995. In that race, the first woman to become Winnipeg's mayor edged out grocer Peter Kaufmann and future Liberal MP Terry Duguid in a three-way race.
Many candidates face long odds
This math means anyone who isn't perceived to be a frontrunner by the withdrawal deadline on Sept. 21 likely won't have a chance of winning on Oct. 27.
Simply put, it's tough to go from single-digit support to 38 per cent in five weeks. It's probably impossible.
It is still too early to determine with any certainty the full list of frontrunners in the 2022 campaign. In the absence of any public opinion polls since a Probe Research survey in July, mayoral campaigns are left to their own devices to determine whether they are among the leaders.
Some are financed well enough to afford their own popular-opinion surveys. If those numbers suggest support in the single digits right now, the only rational reason to remain in the race by the end of next week would be the resolve to complete what they have started.
Experience factor important
There is also an irrational reason: ego. Luckily for politicians, this is a commodity almost every one of them possesses in ample supply.
Somewhere between the rational and irrational lies the experience factor.
All veteran politicians know that campaigns matter. Candidates sometimes succeed against considerable odds, as Brian Bowman did when he came from behind to win a 2014 Winnipeg mayoral race he trailed by 23 per cent with less than two months to go.
This is where candidates who find themselves with support in the 10-to-20 per cent range are living right now. They face long odds to move the needle another 20 points to victory, but feats like this are possible, as Bowman demonstrated eight years ago.
In 2022, every mayoral candidate who is not Glen Murray — his support was pegged at 44 per cent by Probe Research in July — could spend the next few days determining whether they have the numbers to pull off a similar trick.
Some will decide they can and stick it out. Some will decide they can't and remain anyway. Some won't base their decisions on numbers at all.
But if there are still 15 Winnipeg mayoral candidates by the time autumn officially arrives, then you may as well expect all the leaves on trees to remain green until election day and beyond.
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