With around five weeks until the City of Winnipeg ballots are set, the list of potential mayoral candidates is the longest in 30 years.
Last Friday, 14 candidates were registered to run for mayor. If they all decide to move on to the next stage of the electoral process — declarations of candidacy due mid-September — Voters in Winnipeg will have more options for mayor than they have had since 1992, when there were 17 people on the ballot.
This very long list of candidates was the result of a wide-open mayoral race. Bill Norrie, who had been mayor since 1979, decided that 13 years in office was enough.
While 17 potential successors jumped into the political void, voters in Winnipeg paid serious attention to only a handful of big names.
Nearly 97% of the vote gathered around four candidates that year: retail store owner Susan Thompson, who won the race, and city councilors Greg Selinger, Dave Brown and Ernie Gilroy.
The 1992 result is instructive for campaign strategists who believe their candidate could win that year’s race with a very small fraction of the popular vote, given another long list of candidates.
It’s unlikely. Voters tend to turn to candidates who not only like them, but who seem to have a real chance of winning an election.
Not in a hurry to join council races
This is also why polls are so important throughout a campaign: the longer the list of candidates, the more important opinion polls can play in shaping the field, dividing candidates into apparent contenders and as small players.
That’s what happened in 1992, when there were four contenders and 13 also-rans.
Given this trend, it would be surprising to see Winnipeg’s next mayor win less than a third of the popular vote on Oct. 26. Nor would it be a shock to see the winner do even better than that on election night, perhaps even surpassing Susan Thompson’s achievement of attracting 39 percent of the popular vote.
While the list of mayoral candidates is long this year, there’s not been such a rush for candidates to enter the city council races.
On Friday there was no racing six of the city’s 15 neighborhoods. Only one candidate is registered so far in Elmwood-East Kildonan, Fort Rouge-East Fort Garry, North Kildonan, Old Kildonan, St. Norbert-Seine River and Waverley West.
(There was also a Charleswood-Tuxedo-Westwood contender — real estate agent Brad Gross — but CJOB talk show host Hal Anderson says he’ll soon join that open race, created when Councilman Kevin Klein decided to run for mayor.)
The deadline to join the race is September 20. This gives potential council candidates just over five more weeks to offer some competition to the six outgoing councilors who are so far unopposed.
The power of tenure
University of Winnipeg political science professor Aaron Moore suspects the incumbent’s power may scare off potential candidates.
Incumbents enjoy better name recognition and tend to attract more money and endorsements.
“While three incumbents lost in the 2014 election, the norm in the city is for an incumbent to win easily with a majority of votes,” Moore said.
Paul Thomas, professor emeritus of political studies at the University of Manitoba, also suggests that the job itself is becoming less appealing.
People who enter public life suffer from a loss of privacy and are poorly paid for demanding work that requires them to attend lengthy mandatory public meetings for 11 months a year, as well as dozens other meetings and events.
They earn between $110,000 and $123,000 a year, depending on the duties of the committee. While this is well above the average Winnipeg salary, it is below the level of a private sector executive job with similar time demands.
Councilors may also be frustrated with their inability to alleviate major issues such as poverty and homelessness, as the City of Winnipeg falls far short of the kind of taxing and spending powers enjoyed by the provincial and federal governments.
This means that idealistic people who come to council with the aim of improving the lives of their fellow citizens face the prospect of disillusionment when they discover that a large part of the job is deciding whether or not to approve the zoning deviations.
Increase incivility, a deterrent
There is also another, relatively new factor that may deter people from running: increased incivility.
Malice, says Thomas, “has become part of the political process over the past few decades, especially towards women who seek and hold public office.”
It takes an exceptionally resilient person to seek employment that virtually guarantees that they will become the object of abuse, both online and in person.
To be clear, politics has always been mean. But the intensity of the incivility has been amplified by online echo chambers to the point that it’s easy to see why otherwise community-minded people would be reluctant to submit to public life.
“Internet evangelist. Extreme communicator. Subtly charming alcohol aficionado. Typical tv geek.”