Municipal Election Analysis 2018: Thunder Bay Mayoral Race

The results are in and former provincial Liberal Cabinet Minister Bill Mauro will be the next Mayor of Thunder Bay.  Congratulations to Mayor Mauro as well as all the hard-working candidates who chose to run for office.  Thanks also to outgoing council members who have seen years of public service.  Public service is never easy and putting your name forth as a candidate and serving as an elected official is an important act of participation in our democracy.

The new Mayor-Designate took 34 percent of the 41,108 votes cast for mayor edging out soon to be former City Councillor Frank Pullia who took 32 percent of the vote.  The choice of mayor was in many respects part of a general desire for change at the municipal level given that both of the higher profile council incumbent candidates for mayor went down to defeat.  Indeed, the new council represents a significant but not overwhelming amount of change with a number of new faces as well as new but familiar faces – as in the example of the new mayor.

Yet, the aspect of this race I found the most interesting was the collapse of the protest vote which saw Shane Judge garner only 5,155 votes (13 percent of the total) compared to his 2014 total of 9,531 which was a 26 percent share of the total.  Even more interesting was the collapse of support for Iain Angus who as a Councillor at Large in 2014 won with 15,861 votes and who as a candidate for mayor in 2018 was only able to manage about a third of that at 5,816. 

One wonders if this signals a general rightward shift in the Thunder Bay electorate given at least my perception of the generally left of center positions of Iain Angus.  Indeed, this may reflect a weakening of the labour vote in general given that Angus was endorsed by the Thunder Bay District Labour Council for Mayor and none of the five at large candidates endorsed by the Labour council won either.   Only three of the Labour Council ward endorsements won (Foulds, Ch’ng and Oliver). Or it may reflect a shift in voter priorities towards lower property taxes given that taxation was continually brought up as an issue during this campaign.The new mayor and several of the winning candidates have emphasized that taxation rates were an issue.

Figure 1 presents the ranked votes by mayoral candidates and most starkly illustrates how despite there being four high profile candidates, it was essentially a two-person race.  Indeed, one wonders what results would have been like if the provincial liberals had won the spring election and Bill Mauro had not entered the municipal race.  It is possible that in the absence of Bill Mauro’s entry, Frank Pullia might very well be the mayor today.  
 

Much is being made of the success of the new online/telephone voting system so a breakdown by type of ballot is interesting.  While voter participation is up above 50 percent this election and voter totals are up I would not venture to say that more convenient online voting options have resulted in a dramatic surge in participation.  Those who want to vote will vote no matter what the system is and the chief advantage of the new system is that it is more convenient for many people. While 41,108 ballots were cast for mayor this election, last time it was 37,123.  The result was an additional 3985 ballots cast – an increase of 13.4 percent.  This is actually a respectable increase but whether it was due to an appetite for change or the convenience of online voting will take a few more elections to see if the increase is sustained.

Of the 41,108 ballots cast for mayor, 15,249 - 37 percent- were paper ballots while 25,775 – 63 percent – were online/telephone ballots.  The preference does appear to be for the convenience of online/phone voting.  Figure 2 shows the distributions of the paper mayoral ballots. 
 

Figure 3 shows the distribution of the online/telephone ballots and Figure 4 the total distribution.  The results for the paper and the online/telephone ballots generally parallel each other but a closer examination shows that among the paper ballots, Frank Pullia had 33 percent of the vote and Bill Mauro 32 percent while in the online/telephone results it was 35 percent for Bill Mauro and 31 percent for Frank Pullia.  Overall, Bill Mauro became Mayor with 34 percent of the total vote and Frank Pullia was second with about 32 percent.

 

 

This is quite an interesting result because it raises the question as to whether the outcome might have been different if only paper ballots (which incidentally are also tabulated electronically) had been used.  It does appear that Frank Pullia had an edge with more traditional medium voters while Bill Mauro’s edge was with online voters.  This is also interesting given that the Pullia campaign was very social media intensive meaning it was fully engaged with the new technology.

This is also an interesting result because given the overall turnout – about 51 percent – and the number of candidates splitting the votes resulting in the winner only holding 34 percent of the total vote.  It means the mayor in the end was elected by about 17 percent of eligible voters.  This is not Bill Mauro’s fault by any stretch of the imagination.  People who are unhappy with small pools of voters rather than a majority deciding their leaders should make sure they get out and vote. On the other hand, perhaps recognition of this low effective support is why the incoming mayor seems relatively low key and unambitious given that his goal is to focus on one or two soft infrastructure projects - like an indoor tennis facility - rather than roads and bridges. I suspect many voters will be surprised to find out a tennis facility is going to be one of the new mayor's priorities.

In any event, these results should provide food for thought for many analyses to come. Next time, I will take a look at the At-Large results.