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.
00:00:00.060Ahoy everyone, Wyatt Claypool here, back on the whiteboard again to talk about the Calgary Mayoral Race and where all the candidates currently stand.
00:00:10.460Good 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.
00:00:26.480The other good news about the race is that we could actually have a conservative mayor of Calgary.
00:00:33.500And 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.
00:00:43.860It is like an addiction. And so he's turned himself effectively into Nahid, Nenshi, and Gondek combined.
00:00:51.280He 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.
00:01:00.460He used to be good and he just stopped effectively.
00:01:04.440I need to even show you, this is, I've showed this in another video, this is what his campaign team looks like.
00:01:10.660The two people in masks sitting next to him, and there are many, many photos of them like this.
00:01:15.580They wear them still at current events. Those are, in fact, his managers.
00:01:20.380And I even had one person with the guy on the right wearing that mask.
00:01:23.580Someone said, well, maybe his grandmother or his mom is sick and so he's doing it for her.
00:01:28.820He has a flower embroidered, like, hazmat mask. That's because he's woke. That's the only thing that that means.
00:01:36.940Those two people, I don't think, are just the two people who happen to be the super immunocompromised campaign team that Farkas hired.
00:01:45.340But regardless, let's jump more into the numbers in just a second for this race.
00:01:50.160But before I do, guys, I just want to remind you, if you like the show, make sure to leave a like on this video.
00:01:55.540So subscribe if you're not yet a subscriber. Help me reach 100,000 subscribers.
00:02:00.680And also leave a comment on what you think, especially if you're in the city of Calgary.
00:02:05.820And it would be, you know, I would be kicking myself if I didn't do this.
00:02:10.540Guys, if you live in Calgary, please vote for Sonia Sharp if you're conservative.
00:02:14.620She's actually fairly conservative on most of the issues, and she's very conservative when it comes to things like crime.
00:02:20.560And Jeff Davison can't win, and Jeff Davison is not even conservative.
00:02:24.660He literally voted almost one-to-one with Naheed Nenshi and Jody Gondek on council back when he was a councillor between 2017 to 2021.
00:02:34.080His 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.
00:02:41.780So 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.
00:02:53.260And now he is back in a distant fourth place with 9%.
00:03:00.560This 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.
00:03:14.040Now, I would say, though, so these are the stats I'm looking at.
00:03:17.360This actually does have a good sample size of 1,200.
00:03:21.360My 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.
00:03:33.880If you have a poll that's wildly inaccurate, you may start losing contracts because you cook data.
00:03:40.440People in the polling industry, unless you're like the guy who runs ECOS, Frank Graves, you're not cooking numbers.
00:03:47.800You 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.
00:03:56.040So right now, though, we have Jeremy Farkas leading with 20% in this poll, 17% with Sonia Sharp.
00:04:04.060We have 16% for Jody Gondek and 8% for Jeff Davison.
00:04:08.960You also have Brian Thiessen, who is another progressive union candidate at 6%, and then I believe other candidates are at 4% or 5%.
00:04:19.000The 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.
00:04:32.760That means even the leader doesn't even have as many people saying they're going to vote for him as are currently undecided.
00:04:41.220And so far, and this has been through all the polls, the person who has gained the most has been Sonia Sharp.
00:04:49.380Farkas has kind of always actually been in the high teens, if not around 20%.
00:04:53.920We had that one poll from Juno News where it really heavily cut down on the amount of undecides in the poll.
00:04:59.700He was around 32% and Sharp was around like 24% or so, or he's at 30% and Sharp was at 24% or whatever.
00:05:07.360It's mostly just been that Farkas is almost holding at what he had last time, you know, high 20s.
00:05:14.600And then Sonia Sharp, who has started around 5% or 6%, has been consistently moving up as she's been building credibility on issues.
00:05:23.520And just frankly, as the marketing has been kicking into action.
00:05:26.440We're later on in this video going to be going into a Leger poll.
00:05:32.560I 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.
00:05:42.100And then you actually looked at the underlying numbers.
00:05:43.860It's like, well, yeah, because you pulled 2-1 Urban to Suburban when this is a 3-1 Suburban to Urban City.
00:05:50.160When you actually looked at Suburban numbers, it was basically a tie ball game between Sharp and Farkas out there where it matters.
00:05:57.260And 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.
00:08:21.480I 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.
00:08:43.320I think his page only has, like, 1,000 followers on it.
00:08:45.520And I'm, like, wondering where all the money went.
00:08:48.460But whereas right now, Sonia Sharp has cash on hand.
00:08:51.660I will assume I think Gondek does, in fact, have cash on hand.
00:08:55.460Farkas has probably kept fundraising, and he can probably continue to spend at a high level because he is a frontrunner.
00:09:01.960But 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.
00:09:13.460Because 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.
00:09:25.640So right now, Sonia Sharp does have a spending edge.
00:09:29.600Plus, 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.
00:09:38.000Where 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.
00:09:50.000This 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.
00:09:57.280It'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.
00:10:05.100People 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.
00:10:13.620But by sitting on a slate, you actually have to have that association with other individuals.
00:10:18.500And if everyone's a progressive, maybe this guy's just a hyper-progressive.
00:10:23.120And 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.
00:10:31.560So 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.
00:10:38.740I think we'll probably see Gondek mostly retain her support. I don't think it's going to bleed off anywhere.
00:10:44.140If anything, she's bleeding off to Brian Thiessen.
00:10:46.960But if you are currently supporting Jeff Davison and you consider yourself conservative, by the way, he was an endorser of George Chahal in 2021.
00:10:56.900And for some reason, he also takes very weird campaign photos like this with his campaign organizer, Brett Pierce.
00:11:02.660But 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.
00:11:14.420Sonya 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.
00:11:23.140She even adopted my policy of putting police officers directly on the C-trains, so that's fantastic.
00:11:29.460And 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.
00:11:38.840Overall, 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.
00:11:46.880Anyways, in just a second here, I want to get to the Leger poll.
00:11:51.500Hopefully you like this little thing I did on the Think HQ one.
00:11:54.400We are going to jump over to Leger, and I will kind of explain the differences between the numbers in these two polls.
00:12:03.680I'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.
00:12:17.400But 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.
00:12:35.820But this poll also has Mr. Farkas leading by a little bit less, though.
00:13:09.920And then we have Sonia Sharp in third place in this one with 11%.
00:13:18.780Now, 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.
00:13:33.460So I've read through this one, they do not actually show a separation between urban and suburban.
00:13:40.540And 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.
00:13:50.180But in suburban, she was at like 14%, 13%.
00:13:53.500So 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.
00:14:05.420Whereas Farkas in previous polls had actually been doing, in fact, maybe a bit better in urban than suburban.
00:14:12.280But he was only winning the polls because of kind of an iffy urban to suburban mix.
00:14:19.720It just means that you have to take that into account when you read it.
00:14:22.420So 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.
00:14:34.680We've had Farkas go up by 2% since the last poll.
00:14:48.560Now, I actually think a lot of Farkas's lead is based on the idea that he's still the conservative from last time.
00:14:57.440I'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.
00:15:05.460Going to go for Farkas because he was the guy they voted for last time.
00:15:08.860And I had someone talking to them who literally sent my video around like group chats and whatnot.
00:15:14.320And 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.
00:15:23.260And I did hear as soon as people saw that they're like, OK, not voting for Farkas anymore.
00:15:27.360And 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.
00:15:36.280There is always that incumbent rigidity no matter how much people like you.
00:15:40.720But Gondek is really who I would label as the Lori Lightfoot of this race.
00:15:49.160If 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.
00:16:28.500I 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.
00:17:12.400And 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.
00:17:22.440I think with her, she's going to have the lightfoot effect where there's a bunch of candidates.
00:17:28.020So 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.
00:17:35.020Those people will go Brian Teese, and those people will go Farkas.
00:17:37.500They may even go Sharp just because they voted for Gondek under the false pretence he was going to freeze taxes last time.
00:17:43.100Now they actually have to find a real conservative this time.
00:17:45.620She's going to bottom out pretty hard.
00:17:47.940I think she has a ceiling at 20 percent at the highest.
00:17:51.380So I genuinely don't think that Gondek can even win at this point.
00:17:54.560If 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.
00:18:04.520But I'm saying think HQ when it's 1,200.
00:18:07.060When you're struggling as the incumbent, you're losing.