Time to Go, Rocco

Last night it was reported that Rocco Rossi former campaign team had gone from being informal Rossi advisers to supporters of George Smitherman, saying that “We have two weeks to stop four years of chaos in Toronto." This was so humiliating that Team Rocco started spinning in the most ludicrous ways imaginable. It's a stark reminder of everything that's wrong with the Rossi campaign.

I wasn't going to write about that because it was as predictable as the Rossi Survivor's Group's subsequent denial of reality. As the Toronto mayor's race gets closer and closer to the wire, serious people are going to abandon sinking ships and do whatever it takes to stop Rob Ford from winning. That's just the way multi-candidate campaigns work. And while that's funny to watch, it's hardly newsworthy.

However, this poll was released this afternoon and it effectively undercuts any reason Rossi has for continuing.

A new poll conducted over Thanksgiving weekend shows a dead heat between Toronto mayoral frontrunners Rob Ford and George Smitherman, with the former deputy premier edging the Etobicoke councillor by one percentage point.

Of the 400 people surveyed in the Ipsos Reid poll, conducted for Newstalk 1010, 31 per cent said they plan to vote for Mr. Smitherman – and 30 per cent supported Mr. Ford. Deputy mayor Joe Pantalone garnered 11 per cent of the vote, while 4 per cent of those polled said they’d vote for Rocco Rossi if the vote were held tomorrow.

That's a significant turnaround from just a month ago, when Ford was blowing away Smitherman by 24 points. By the looks of it, not only has all Sarah Thomson's support gone to Smitherman, so has almost a third of Joe Pantalone's and over half of Rossi's.

As I predicted months ago, Ford's softer supporters are starting to melt away. That could be because he peaked early or because nearly 15% of Ford's voters like the idea of him in office more than the reality of it. Populist votes are almost always protest votes, and protest votes are only protests until it looks like the protest candidate is going to actually win. Ontario learned the hard way how a protest vote can go awry when we accidentally elected Bob Rae premier in 1990. So it is with Rob Ford.

However, two of the Rossi campaign's most consistent memes - that Rocco is "everybody's second choice" and that his support would go to Ford - have both been shown to be transparent nonsense.Since the last major poll both Rossi and Ford have lost ground. As Blazing Cat Fur points out, Rossi's vote is now even smaller than the margin of error in the poll.

It's now mathematically impossible for Rocco Rossi to win and it's clear that he's not draining enough support from Ford to matter in any real way. At this point, he's just embarrassing himself to no real purpose. If he wants to save even a shred of dignity for himself, he'll drop out by Friday.

That leaves Joe Pantalone, and the pressure on him to drop out and endorse Smitherman is going to be irresistible. If even half of Pantalone's vote goes to Smitherman, we have a mayor, regardless of what happens to Ford's numbers.

Of course, the number of undecideds is still unnaturally high - at 25%, where it's been all along - but I think that they've been waiting to see where the Anyone But Ford vote goes. If the undecideds were going to Ford, they would've already. When they break for a frontrunner, they usually do so early, and Ford's been ahead of the pack since late spring.

Thank god my protest vote, Sarah Thomson, is still on the ballot because I don't like any of these assholes.



Updated 8:54 PM: That was fast.