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Poll Position: More Residents Disapprove than Approve of Rob Ford as Mayor

Poll conducted two days after major transit loss at council shows that disapproval of Ford is becoming more entrenched.

By Hamutal Dotan

ROB FORD’S APPROVAL RATING

Strongly approve: 27%

Somewhat approve: 16%

Neither approve nor disapprove: 9%

Somewhat disapprove: 12%

Strongly disapprove: 35%

Don’t know/no answer: 2%

OF THOSE WITH AN OPINION

Approve: 47%

Disapprove: 53%

Poll taken: February 9–10, 2012
Sample size: 1,300
Margin of Error: +/-2.7%, 19 times out of 20
Methodology: Automated telephone poll
Conducted by: Stratcom


NOTES: Polls taken immediately after a major victory or major defeat aren’t necessarily helpful in understanding what’s going on in constituents’ minds. Results are inevitably inflated by recent events; the effect of the victory or loss generally fades somewhat over time, becoming less important in voters’ evaluations a month or a year later. However, insofar as Rob Ford and his allies have been saying that they have strong backing from the people of Toronto—that council’s decision to reinstate light rail as a central element of transit planning doesn’t reflect what “real people” actually want—these results are hardly encouraging. In the press release Stratcom sent out yesterday, they drew attention to the high number of Torontonians who strongly disapprove of the mayor, describing it as a “steady hardening” against Ford. A silver lining for the mayor: his base of core supporters remains steady, at 27 per cent (he was at 26 per cent in Stratcom’s last poll, in July 2011).

The poll, which Stratcom director of research John Willis says was not commissioned by any client, also looks at support for the mayor in different regions of the city. Perhaps surprisingly, given the fact that his transit plan didn’t include any infrastructure for Finch, Ford’s support is strongest in North York: 35 per cent of residents there strongly approve of the mayor (compared to 30 per cent in Scarborough, 29 per cent in his home area of Etobicoke, and 20 per cent in Toronto/York). Disapproval is by far highest in Toronto/York, where 51 per cent strongly disapprove of Ford. And Scarborough—a focus of much of the transit debate, with heated discussion about undergrounding the Eglinton LRT and the viability of the Sheppard subway—is the least sure of the mayor, with 18 per cent saying they neither approve nor disapprove, or that they don’t know what they think of him.

Complete poll results are available from Stratcom.

Comments

  • Check your math…

    the numbers as listed above don’t add up …

    • Anonymous

      You mean the total in the first batch? Due to rounding, poll totals are often off by a percent or two.

  • Check your math…

    never mind…my mistake

  • Anonymous

    In related news, 27+16+9 = 52% of Torontonians aren’t paying attention.

    • Anonymous

      Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop them from voting.

      • Anonymous

        Or not voting, for the mater. Which could be worse.

  • Anonymous

    As someone who has every reason to want to gloat, I don’t think these are gloating numbers – those are numbers that can get Rob Ford re-elected (keep in mind that his approval rating of 47% precisely tracks his 2010 vote total).

    While the arguments against Ford, and the Ford transit “plan”*, may seem obvious to most who comment here, the great majority of voters are low information voters. And the narrative the last few days is that Rob Ford was handed a stinging defeat in his quest to bring subways to Toronto, something something streetcars, something something Scarborough got screwed. In short, most Torontonians desire subways, Rob Ford supports subways, this vote was about subways, and Rob Ford lost that vote. From Ford’s perspective, that ain’t a bad platform for 2014 – “I was undermined by council, so vote for me, and elect a few more Ford Nation councillors.”

    [*not an actual plan]

    There needs to be much better push-back against this narrative, and especially the notion that one plan (call it the “Stintz plan”) prevailed over the other (“Ford subway plan”). The reality is that there was NEVER A SUBWAY PLAN. While Ford had a nominal notion of building subways, he had no actual plan to build any subway. The Eglinton line involved spending oodles of money to bury light rail, in – literally – the world’s only extended subterranian LRT line, where nobody had actually figured out the engineering logistics of accomplishing this. And the Sheppard “plan” involved discovering a huge oil reserved under Nathan Phillips Square fund it.

    We need better communications. Rob Ford doesn’t support subways, he supports pixie dust and unicorns, and people need to understand this.

    • Ian MacIntyre

      I agree with everything you’ve said here. My hope is that Stintz and her fellow councillors who supported the original LRT plan were worried about attacking the mayor too openly on last week’s vote. Once the next election rolls around, my hope is that if the right person runs against Ford (and hopefully 4 of the right person don’t run against Ford, cancelling each other out), and that they waste no time in dismantling and attacking the simplistic narrative Ford has been allowed to build since his campaign. Still, it wouldn’t hurt for that push back to start now.

      I’m not totally hopeful though. I watched Ford debate in the last election, and it was mind-boggling. Smitherman or Pantalone would ask him a direct question about why his financial projections made no sense, and he would just smirk and ignore them until they started arguing amongst each other. Plus with the Sun eagerly regurgitating any hare-brained scheme Ford’s campaign comes up with, it’s gonna be a tough campaign.

  • Anonymous

    Ford seems to do most his work under the media radar, and the media has done a less than stellar job of digging into that story, where they haven’t been abject patsies and/or enablers (and guess what: media conglomerates don’t want to pay taxes either).

    It would be quite interesting to know what he’s been up to with e.g. the “robocalls” post-election to shore up support — surely someone has made recordings (I did a quick search on youtube, but turned up nothing). Maybe it doesn’t matter: he’s got their ear, they have tuned out other voices, and until a shocking property tax bill lands on their doorstep, that is that.

    He’s a polarizing figure, but that’s part of an overall deliberate right-wing strategy, and rather successful.

    • Anonymous

      I actually still have one of Ford’s robocalls on my answering machine telling me to vote for… I forget his name but the Con candidate in my riding, and he won too in what is usually a Lib stronghold. I kept it at first because I couldn’t believe I was hearing the mayor telling me who to vote for in a federal election by robocall, and since then have just forgotten all about it until I saw your post but its still there. I gather that’s not the robocall you’re talking about though, I never got any other robocalls from Ford but that one.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=48904447 Chris Orbz

    “Polls taken immediately after a major victory or major defeat”

    In Canada, we call those “Federal Elections.”

  • Anonymous

    Considering all the bad press last week on the Transit file, Ford’s numbers are surprisingly good. If he can somehow put the Transit issue behind him this year-and get is brother to keep quiet- he has an excellent chance at re-election because he is doing well on the core issues that got him elected. He has stopped the spending spiral at City Hall, contracted out garbage with bigger than expected savings, started turning around the economic folly at the Housing Authority and best of all won a huge victory over CUPE by rolling back the jobs for life clause to a liveable 15 years without a strike. In 4 year election cycles governments always push hard on controversial issues then back off going into the next election and Ford is barely finished one year and he doesn’t have to negotiate with the unions in this term. The other big thing Ford has got going is that when McGuinty starts making the big cuts necessary to balance the budget, Ford’s will probably look quite moderate in comparison and the left’s attempts to falsely brand him a “radical” Con will look foolish. Putting the public servants in their place, not transit, was always Ford’s principle mandate from the voters and he has been largely successful and will have an excellent platform to run on especially against any of Council’s left wing like Vaughan who can easily be painted as public servant patsies who will just hand out another jobs for life clause extension to their friends, just like Miller.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Vote-Ndp/547678963 Vote Ndp

    Mr Ford will continue to crash and burning right up to the ’14 election