The June 26, 2023, election followed a short but eventful campaign. Turnout was considerably higher than in last fall’s general election. A total of 722,877 ballots were cast, 30.1% more than the 551,890 cast in 2022. This was the fourth-highest number of votes cast in the nine mayoral elections held since amalgamation in 1997, and only 32,616 less than were cast in the 2018 election.
Although Olivia Chow polled in first place throughout the campaign period, a large number of top-tier candidates jockeyed to break through the noise to become the clear alternative, or even to jump into first place. Not since 2003 have so many “serious” candidates run for mayor in an open race. Running against the well-known New Democrat Olivia Chow were two sitting members of council, Brad Bradford (Beaches-East York) and Josh Matlow (Toronto-St. Paul’s). (We’ll set aside Councillor Anthony Peruzza, who won only a few hundred votes in the end.) This being a by-election, councillors could keep their ward seats while running for mayor. Former councillor Ana Bailão ultimately received an endorsement from disgraced ex-mayor John Tory. Fresh from defeat as the Progressive Conservative candidate in Don Valley West in the 2022 provincial election, former police chief Mark Saunders was Premier Doug Ford’s preferred candidate. Rounding out the list were Mitzie Hunter, MPP for Scarborough-Guildwood and former provincial Liberal cabinet minister; Toronto Sun columnist Anthony Furey; and Chloe Brown, who came in a surprise (if distant) third place in last fall’s mayoral general election.
That so many major candidates remained the race to the end is testament to the degree to which they possessed distinct support bases and fundraising networks – which, we show below, is reflected in the different geographies of electoral support. In the end, fully 69.6% of votes cast went to the top two finishers – Chow (37.2%) and Bailão (32.5%) while the rest competed for scraps.
Unlike in previous mayoral elections, considerable movement occurred between the June 8–13 advance voting period and the June 26 election day. Chow performed far better in advance (46.6%) and mail-in (50.8%) voting than she did on election day (34.3%). Bailão, by contrast, surged on election day, likely due to Tory’s endorsement on July 21. Although Bailão beat Chow in terms of ballots cast on election day, Chow’s advance and mail-in votes put her over the top when all votes were counted.
Mapping election day votes by poll, we find that Olivia Chow did best in the core: neighbourhoods within the seven wards that roughly correspond to the pre-amalgamation City of Toronto and Boroughs of York and East York south of St. Clair Avenue. This is not simply an of City of Toronto-versus-the-rest story. She also received diffuse support in the postwar suburbs of Scarborough, North Etobicoke, and east flank of North York, with concentrations of support in rental apartment clusters, most visibility in Thorncliffe Park. The neighbourhoods where she did the least well are among the wealthiest in the city; the neighbourhoods where she did best are not only downtown hipster enclaves, but also those containing high numbers of immigrants.
Bailão’s map is more or less the inverse of Chow’s. She did best in the well-off neighbourhoods of central Etobicoke, Scarborough south of Kingston Road, Rosedale, North Toronto, the Bridle Path, Don Mills, and Willowdale. She may also have benefitted from support from southern European immigrant voters – predominantly Portuguese and Italians – in her former ward of Davenport and to the northwest in York and Weston.
Now let’s look at how Chow’s and Bailão’s support changed between early voting (advance polls and mail-in ballots) and election day, Unfortunately we can only map this by ward. The four maps below show, on the left, ward-level support for Chow and Bailão in early voting, and, on the right, the percentage-point change in each ward from early voting to election day. In general, it appears that Bailão increased her vote share the most in the city’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, as voters shifted away from Saunders and Bradford in an effort to stop Chow, and Tory’s endorsement attracted Chow voters to the Bailão camp. In no ward, however, were Chow’s losses greater than Bailão’s gains. Starting at a higher level of support in early voting, Chow still came out ahead.
Olivia Chow Advance Voting
Ana Bailão Advance Voting
This is, of course, not Chow’s first rodeo. She ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2014, losing badly to winner John Tory and second-place finisher Doug Ford. Let’s compare Chow’s 2023 election-day map to her 2014 results.
What we find is that Chow did well where she, and other progressive candidates from Gomberg (2000) to Keesmaat (2018) to Peñalosa (2022), have done well before: in the gentrified and gentrifying working-class order neighbourhoods of the pre-amalgamation City of Toronto. Essential to her 2023 win, however, was the addition of not only of diffuse support elsewhere in the city (something David Miller also managed in 2003 and 2006), but also majority support in less-well-off suburban neighbourhoods, many of which are home to immigrants, and which had voted for the Fords and Tory in previous elections.
In our next post we’ll look at the major candidates who staked out ground on the political right – Mark Saunders, Brad Bradford, and Andrew Furey.
Official election results and the voting subdivsions (poll catchment areas) were downloaded from the City of Toronto. The code and data used to build this page and its graphics are on GitHub.
