The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - October 04, 2025


Gondek is Losing! Polls shows A Conservative can win!


Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

168.60245

Word count

3,271

Sentence count

219

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Jody Gondek is no longer the favourite to win the race for mayor of Calgary, Alberta. Is it possible that we could actually have a conservative mayor of the city of Calgary? I break down the numbers and give my thoughts on the race.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.060 Ahoy everyone, Wyatt Claypool here, back on the whiteboard again to talk about the Calgary Mayoral Race and where all the candidates currently stand.
00:00:10.460 Good news, it does not look like Incumbent Mayor Jody Gondek is going to be winning this one because, my goodness, if you are in third place as the incumbent, sorry, it's just not in the cards for you.
00:00:26.480 The other good news about the race is that we could actually have a conservative mayor of Calgary.
00:00:33.500 And no, I am not talking about Jeremy Farkas. After he lost the 2021 Calgary Mayor's Race, his brain broke and he decided that he needs to become mayor.
00:00:43.860 It is like an addiction. And so he's turned himself effectively into Nahid, Nenshi, and Gondek combined.
00:00:51.280 He just kind of hooked from their sort of platforms and their styles and is now running a campaign based on that sort of more left-wing philosophy.
00:01:00.460 He used to be good and he just stopped effectively.
00:01:04.440 I need to even show you, this is, I've showed this in another video, this is what his campaign team looks like.
00:01:10.660 The two people in masks sitting next to him, and there are many, many photos of them like this.
00:01:15.580 They wear them still at current events. Those are, in fact, his managers.
00:01:20.380 And I even had one person with the guy on the right wearing that mask.
00:01:23.580 Someone said, well, maybe his grandmother or his mom is sick and so he's doing it for her.
00:01:28.820 He has a flower embroidered, like, hazmat mask. That's because he's woke. That's the only thing that that means.
00:01:36.940 Those two people, I don't think, are just the two people who happen to be the super immunocompromised campaign team that Farkas hired.
00:01:45.340 But regardless, let's jump more into the numbers in just a second for this race.
00:01:50.160 But before I do, guys, I just want to remind you, if you like the show, make sure to leave a like on this video.
00:01:55.540 So subscribe if you're not yet a subscriber. Help me reach 100,000 subscribers.
00:02:00.680 And also leave a comment on what you think, especially if you're in the city of Calgary.
00:02:05.820 And it would be, you know, I would be kicking myself if I didn't do this.
00:02:10.540 Guys, if you live in Calgary, please vote for Sonia Sharp if you're conservative.
00:02:14.620 She's actually fairly conservative on most of the issues, and she's very conservative when it comes to things like crime.
00:02:20.560 And Jeff Davison can't win, and Jeff Davison is not even conservative.
00:02:24.660 He literally voted almost one-to-one with Naheed Nenshi and Jody Gondek on council back when he was a councillor between 2017 to 2021.
00:02:34.080 His campaign team is in deep denial of this, but it's just true, which is really funny because some of them worked for Farkas last time. 1.00
00:02:41.780 So it would have been like their part-time job going around telling Jeff Davison supporters that he's too liberal because Jeff Davison ran in 21, and he came in a distant, distant third place back then.
00:02:53.260 And now he is back in a distant fourth place with 9%.
00:02:58.160 Now, I'm going to be very clear.
00:03:00.560 This is a poll from Think HQ, which the owner of, Mark Henry, also worked with Communities First, which is Jody Gondek's, not Jody Gondek's, which is, sorry, Sonia Sharp's party.
00:03:14.040 Now, I would say, though, so these are the stats I'm looking at.
00:03:17.360 This actually does have a good sample size of 1,200.
00:03:21.360 My thing is that if you're Mark Henry, you're not going to do a poll that's completely inaccurate to the actual race because you're in the polling business.
00:03:33.880 If you have a poll that's wildly inaccurate, you may start losing contracts because you cook data.
00:03:40.440 People in the polling industry, unless you're like the guy who runs ECOS, Frank Graves, you're not cooking numbers.
00:03:47.800 You might not have great numbers, but you're not cooking numbers unless you're a complete hack and Think HQ is a veteran firm at this point.
00:03:56.040 So right now, though, we have Jeremy Farkas leading with 20% in this poll, 17% with Sonia Sharp.
00:04:04.060 We have 16% for Jody Gondek and 8% for Jeff Davison.
00:04:08.960 You also have Brian Thiessen, who is another progressive union candidate at 6%, and then I believe other candidates are at 4% or 5%.
00:04:19.000 The thing about this poll, though, that means that the race is going to stay competitive right up to the end is that there was 27% people who are undecided, which is quite a number.
00:04:32.760 That means even the leader doesn't even have as many people saying they're going to vote for him as are currently undecided.
00:04:41.220 And so far, and this has been through all the polls, the person who has gained the most has been Sonia Sharp.
00:04:49.380 Farkas has kind of always actually been in the high teens, if not around 20%.
00:04:53.920 We had that one poll from Juno News where it really heavily cut down on the amount of undecides in the poll.
00:04:59.700 He was around 32% and Sharp was around like 24% or so, or he's at 30% and Sharp was at 24% or whatever.
00:05:07.360 It's mostly just been that Farkas is almost holding at what he had last time, you know, high 20s.
00:05:14.600 And then Sonia Sharp, who has started around 5% or 6%, has been consistently moving up as she's been building credibility on issues.
00:05:23.520 And just frankly, as the marketing has been kicking into action.
00:05:26.440 We're later on in this video going to be going into a Leger poll.
00:05:30.420 I don't mind the Leger polls.
00:05:31.800 They're pretty good.
00:05:32.560 I wish they would separate Suburban and Urban a little bit better because in a previous poll, what they had done was it showed that Farkas had like this really big lead. 0.68
00:05:42.100 And then you actually looked at the underlying numbers.
00:05:43.860 It's like, well, yeah, because you pulled 2-1 Urban to Suburban when this is a 3-1 Suburban to Urban City.
00:05:50.160 When you actually looked at Suburban numbers, it was basically a tie ball game between Sharp and Farkas out there where it matters.
00:05:57.260 And if it was tied back then and she keeps moving up, I think that she's probably going to be able to pull off the win in general.
00:06:03.520 So overall, Sharp has been going up.
00:06:06.580 You've had Gondek basically falling down and then stalling out.
00:06:11.160 And the entire time, Farkas has stalled out. 0.98
00:06:15.420 Davison, I don't even really know what to say about his polling position.
00:06:18.820 He started probably around 10-12%, and he has fallen and, like Gondek, just stalled out.
00:06:27.560 It's funny, too.
00:06:28.880 I read an article recently from the Calgary Herald.
00:06:32.380 I can link it in the description below if you guys are interested.
00:06:35.720 It was showing campaign spending and intake for donations and spending between January 1st and July 31st.
00:06:44.960 That is the first date that the campaigns must disclose.
00:06:48.080 We're not going to get any more fundraising information up until that point.
00:06:52.640 But Farkas, and I don't want to go too much into fundraising, but he brought in around, you know, $160K, something like that.
00:07:03.380 Sharp had brought in, like, $220K.
00:07:07.740 Gondek in that period.
00:07:09.040 She had been fundraising in previous years, but it was pretty mild.
00:07:12.980 But her fundraising was, like, $149K.
00:07:16.040 And I think Davison's was, like, $142K.
00:07:19.440 Okay.
00:07:20.640 $142,000, $149,000, $229,000.
00:07:24.380 Farkas, $160K.
00:07:25.880 The thing with Farkas, though, is I believe he had, like, spent more than he brought in.
00:07:33.180 He spent, like, around $200,000.
00:07:36.440 So this is going to be donations up on the first level and then spending on the second consistently.
00:07:43.660 Whereas Sharp had spent around, like, $160K.
00:07:47.880 You had Gondek. 0.81
00:07:50.360 I don't remember what her spending was.
00:07:52.860 But with Jeff Davison, with $142,000, $149,000, around those numbers, I'm not entirely accurate here, but I'm generally accurate.
00:08:03.760 With this kind of mid-$100,000 that he brought in, he spent, like, $229,000 in that period.
00:08:13.240 And I haven't noticed a cent of it anywhere.
00:08:16.780 There is no evidence that the man is even in the race.
00:08:19.920 Like, he has signs out.
00:08:21.480 I mean, like, he has weird Twitter trolls harassing me, like, literally saying I should have been shot instead of Charlie Kirk, you know, posting my phone number on the internet.
00:08:30.220 He has that going for him.
00:08:32.100 But Jeff Davison feels like the fake conservative Kamala Harris of the race.
00:08:37.100 His entire spending is on, like, staff.
00:08:39.720 I don't notice.
00:08:40.840 Where are the YouTube ads?
00:08:42.240 Where are the Facebook ads?
00:08:43.320 I think his page only has, like, 1,000 followers on it.
00:08:45.520 And I'm, like, wondering where all the money went.
00:08:48.460 But whereas right now, Sonia Sharp has cash on hand. 0.92
00:08:51.660 I will assume I think Gondek does, in fact, have cash on hand.
00:08:55.460 Farkas has probably kept fundraising, and he can probably continue to spend at a high level because he is a frontrunner.
00:09:01.960 But at the end of the day, though, you can't just throw out another $150,000 in the last week if you think that you're falling behind, if you don't have the donor reserves in there for you.
00:09:13.460 Because if you end the race losing and with $100,000 in debt, it's going to be really hard to go around with a bag and ask people for cash just to make you solvent again for a campaign that has already lost.
00:09:25.640 So right now, Sonia Sharp does have a spending edge. 0.99
00:09:29.600 Plus, because she is with the community's first party, she has people going around and able to market for her, even though she's not there herself.
00:09:38.000 Where Farkas, because he's an independent candidate, and this is the same thing with Gondek and Davison, although Davison kind of works with the ABC party, they have to kind of create an entire citywide campaign just for themselves.
00:09:50.000 This is actually why municipal parties are a good thing. I know people don't like them at the moment because it's change and people don't like change.
00:09:57.280 It's good because it means that people actually have to take ideological stances, because if you are on a slate of other candidates, people are going to start noticing similarities.
00:10:05.100 People can't just pretend they're community leaders who just really care about, you know, standing up for the community and freezing your taxes and things that they never actually achieve.
00:10:13.620 But by sitting on a slate, you actually have to have that association with other individuals.
00:10:18.500 And if everyone's a progressive, maybe this guy's just a hyper-progressive.
00:10:23.120 And so the community's first party, though, is able to go around and leaflet drop and do a lot of other marketing for Sonya while she is not there.
00:10:31.560 So I think at some point we are going to see her leapfrog Farkas, or it's just going to be this neck-and-neck race until the end. 1.00
00:10:38.740 I think we'll probably see Gondek mostly retain her support. I don't think it's going to bleed off anywhere.
00:10:44.140 If anything, she's bleeding off to Brian Thiessen.
00:10:46.960 But if you are currently supporting Jeff Davison and you consider yourself conservative, by the way, he was an endorser of George Chahal in 2021.
00:10:56.900 And for some reason, he also takes very weird campaign photos like this with his campaign organizer, Brett Pierce.
00:11:02.660 But if you're one of those 9%, goodness, if even just a few of you jump over to Sonya Sharp, it makes the math here so much better. 0.82
00:11:14.420 Sonya Sharp even just got the endorsement from the Calgary Police Association, because she's like the only one actually committing to a firm number of more police officers she will hire, which is 500.
00:11:23.140 She even adopted my policy of putting police officers directly on the C-trains, so that's fantastic.
00:11:29.460 And a bunch of other stuff, opening the downtown, a new downtown police station, trying to actually cut administrative spending and reduce the power of administration.
00:11:38.840 Overall, it's not a perfect platform, but if you're a conservative in Calgary, you haven't seen anyone who's going to be this responsible since Ralph Klein was mayor.
00:11:46.880 Anyways, in just a second here, I want to get to the Leger poll.
00:11:51.500 Hopefully you like this little thing I did on the Think HQ one.
00:11:54.400 We are going to jump over to Leger, and I will kind of explain the differences between the numbers in these two polls.
00:12:01.840 Okay, I'm back.
00:12:03.680 I'm just going to keep this one to just the top three candidates, because after you get to number four, you're really just talking about also rands who may end up grabbing like a dozen points in the polls.
00:12:15.080 And that's at best.
00:12:17.400 But right now in Leger, which does have more undecideds than the Think HQ one, this one, just to start off, has 35% undecided voters, which actually seems a bit high at this point, because we are kind of getting towards the end.
00:12:35.820 But this poll also has Mr. Farkas leading by a little bit less, though.
00:12:40.920 So this one has him leading with 16%.
00:12:45.240 We then have, we have actually gone deck in this one, coming second place.
00:12:51.620 And this is where I'm going to explain the difference to you in a little bit of why she'd be higher here, but not in the other one.
00:12:59.180 Oh, that got my way right there.
00:13:02.920 Look at that poor planning, Wyatt.
00:13:04.660 But you get the point, guys.
00:13:06.040 She is at 14% in this poll. 0.86
00:13:09.920 And then we have Sonia Sharp in third place in this one with 11%.
00:13:18.780 Now, I would say, mind you, in this poll for Leger, we are having not only what is a smaller sample size, but a more urban sample size based on the numbers they put in their previous poll.
00:13:33.460 So I've read through this one, they do not actually show a separation between urban and suburban.
00:13:40.540 And so based on what I had seen last time, because when you looked at the last poll, it put Sharp at only like 4% or 5% in urban.
00:13:50.180 But in suburban, she was at like 14%, 13%. 0.87
00:13:53.500 So if she's 11%, I would assume then, if we looked at her suburban numbers, she may be more like 17% or 18% and then 6% in an urban area.
00:14:05.420 Whereas Farkas in previous polls had actually been doing, in fact, maybe a bit better in urban than suburban.
00:14:12.280 But he was only winning the polls because of kind of an iffy urban to suburban mix.
00:14:17.740 It doesn't mean the poll is bad.
00:14:19.720 It just means that you have to take that into account when you read it.
00:14:22.420 So this has actually shown since the last Leger poll, although remember, take it with the grain of salt that this is a bit of an urban suburban issue between like there's a bit of an urban suburban mix up right here.
00:14:34.680 We've had Farkas go up by 2% since the last poll.
00:14:40.360 We've had Gondek fall by one point.
00:14:43.600 And we had Sonia Sharp go up by 3%.
00:14:48.560 Now, I actually think a lot of Farkas's lead is based on the idea that he's still the conservative from last time.
00:14:57.440 I've had people talk to people in the police union, the police association, who they actually were as, you know, just kind of street level cops.
00:15:05.460 Going to go for Farkas because he was the guy they voted for last time.
00:15:08.860 And I had someone talking to them who literally sent my video around like group chats and whatnot.
00:15:14.320 And I can tell because my video suddenly how like my video on Farkas from a couple weeks back suddenly got like another 500 views overnight.
00:15:23.260 And I did hear as soon as people saw that they're like, OK, not voting for Farkas anymore. 1.00
00:15:27.360 And so I think that as Farkas is going to gain momentum off of Gondek bleeding off a little bit, I don't think she's going to fall that much.
00:15:36.280 There is always that incumbent rigidity no matter how much people like you.
00:15:40.720 But Gondek is really who I would label as the Lori Lightfoot of this race. 0.80
00:15:49.160 If you don't know who Lori Lightfoot was, she was the former Chicago mayor who in, I believe it was like the 2021 Chicago mayoral election got absolutely blown out.
00:16:03.620 I want to go find that for you guys.
00:16:04.980 Oh, no, it was 2023.
00:16:06.860 I need to bring this up on screen.
00:16:08.120 It was funny.
00:16:09.660 She did absolutely terribly.
00:16:11.560 And her disapproval numbers are pretty similar to Jody Gondek.
00:16:16.660 So this is it basically breaks down into first round and second round for Chicago mayor.
00:16:22.720 And she didn't even make it to second round.
00:16:24.940 She got 16.81 percent of the vote.
00:16:28.500 I am going to go off on a limb and say that especially in a field as crowded as the Calgary mayoral election, because it's not just Farkas, Sharpe, and Gondek.
00:16:37.940 It's Davison.
00:16:38.920 It's Thieson.
00:16:40.060 It's Graham.
00:16:42.120 Yeager.
00:16:43.180 Graham.
00:16:44.080 What's his name again?
00:16:45.100 I'm trying to figure it out here.
00:16:47.320 Gustafson.
00:16:48.320 There you go.
00:16:49.080 Yeager.
00:16:50.300 Gustafson.
00:16:50.920 You have Grant Pryor.
00:16:52.080 Jeffrey Clausen.
00:16:53.420 You just get always a big cavalcade of people.
00:16:55.620 Sarah Elder's running, who was formerly the co-chair of Farkas's campaign.
00:17:00.220 I don't know what the heck is going on there.
00:17:01.840 But with all these people running, I think that with Gondek's unpopularity, her approval is only like 30 percent, which is pathetic.
00:17:10.800 Her approval rating is 30 percent.
00:17:12.400 And usually you're not going to get 100 percent of the people who approve you voting for you, unless it's just a two-horse race, and you actually may be able to exceed your approval because it's you or the other guy.
00:17:22.440 I think with her, she's going to have the lightfoot effect where there's a bunch of candidates. 1.00
00:17:28.020 So even the people who approve of her, which means the people who like somewhat are okay with her mixed in there, those people will go somewhere else.
00:17:35.020 Those people will go Brian Teese, and those people will go Farkas. 1.00
00:17:37.500 They may even go Sharp just because they voted for Gondek under the false pretence he was going to freeze taxes last time.
00:17:43.100 Now they actually have to find a real conservative this time.
00:17:45.620 She's going to bottom out pretty hard. 1.00
00:17:47.940 I think she has a ceiling at 20 percent at the highest. 1.00
00:17:51.380 So I genuinely don't think that Gondek can even win at this point.
00:17:54.560 If you're struggling just to be in second place and, frankly, in more accurate polls, because this one only has a sample size of like 500, 500 is not even that bad.
00:18:04.520 But I'm saying think HQ when it's 1,200.
00:18:07.060 When you're struggling as the incumbent, you're losing.
00:18:10.380 I'm sorry.
00:18:11.100 Sorry to Gondek.
00:18:12.700 You're a bad mayor, but I'm still sorry.
00:18:14.660 Anyways, so that should be it for me today, guys.
00:18:17.400 Again, if you're in the city of Calgary, please go get yourself a Sonya Sharp sign.
00:18:20.700 Link in the description below and pinned at the top of the comments.
00:18:24.220 Better do it.
00:18:25.000 I think we've actually had, from this channel, I think around 1,000 of you have gotten signs for Gondek or Sharp.
00:18:31.660 We have almost probably put out more signs for her than pretty much anyone else has.
00:18:39.040 Actually, no, easily.
00:18:40.340 We actually probably have placed more than one-third of Sharp signs around the city, potentially.
00:18:46.620 I'm not going to give myself that much credit.
00:18:48.200 Maybe we've only done 500 or 700.
00:18:50.420 But you guys have been fantastic, and I will see you guys all next time.
00:18:54.060 We'll see you guys all next time.