Marit Stiles says out loud what many Ontarians are thinking. So why won't they vote for her?

Those aides could not have known that in a few hours Ford would boast of a cakewalk to a fourth Progressive Conservative majority win. Nor did they expect Stiles to respond by proclaiming, “Maybe you won’t get another mandate — because you’ll get prison, Doug!”

There was no public groundswell of support for Stiles’s claim. Its fallout arrived and ended.

But what did not happen after the theatrics is the real story.

With her other relentless critiques — of Ford’s private-use jet purchase (and return), his escape from freedom of information oversight and his obsession with expanding the downtown Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport — Stiles is saying out loud what many voters are thinking.

All that effort is gaining voter traction — for the Liberals.

As the Official Opposition, the New Democrats are investing considerable resources toward their anti-Ford position and, according to a recent Abacus Data survey for the Star, 70 per cent would prefer a new government.

But instead of supporting the NDP, voters are eyeing the third-place Grits, who will not even have a leader until Nov. 21.

The Liberals are now at 32 per cent support in the Abacus survey. Ford’s third-term Tories have the support of 41 per cent voters. And the NDP? It is at 19 per cent — virtually the same as its share of the popular vote in the 2025 provincial election.

Stiles’s challenge, said Abacus Data president David Coletto, is a limited pool of accessible voters.

“As long as more people are open to voting Liberal than they are NDP, I think the New Democrats are going to have a hard time,” said Coletto, referring to the fact that 54 per cent of respondents “would consider voting” Liberal compared to 43 per cent for the NDP and 47 per cent for the Tories.

In a bit of good news, Ford’s negative rating exceeded those who did not feel warmly toward Stiles.

In the survey, 31 per cent of respondents said they had a positive impression of her, while 25 per cent had a negative view, for a plus six per cent favourability rating, with 29 per cent neutral and 16 per cent uncertain. By comparison, Ford was at 36 per cent positive, 42 per cent negative for a minus six per cent rating, with 20 per cent of respondents neutral and two per cent unsure.

Abacus surveyed 2,182 Ontarians from June 12 to June 17 using online panels based on the PureSpectrum platform. While opt-in polls cannot be assigned a margin of error, for comparison purposes, a random sample of this size would have one of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

All of this suggests that Stiles is “generally well-liked,” Coletto said, but still not well known. 

The NDP is working on it. 

In an interview last week, Stiles said her talk of hospitals, education and costly groceries is gaining traction. 

“What I’m doing seems to be resonating with a lot of people,” she said.

Part of that comes from the use of videos to push Stiles’s anti-Ford sentiments on social media.

Charlie Mancini, the NDP’s interim chief of staff, said the party is taking inspiration from other progressive campaigns, including the visual posts used by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The New Democrats are upping their game, Mancini said, by adding videographers who follow Stiles and her MPPs, making short videos for Instagram or X that often point to more policy-focused pieces on YouTube.

The value, said Mancini, is notable in public interactions with Stiles. People now cross the road to shake her hand and discuss issues, he said; at the Pride parade in Toronto, so many people wanted to say hello that she later had to sprint to catch up to the rest of her team.

In the early spring, the NDP video strategy had its Queen’s Park opponents on edge, according to a Liberal insider, who expressed admiration for its social media campaign and watched nervously as the “likes” soared.

“During that period, we were all looking at each other and we were like, ‘S — t, is this going to show up in the polls? Is this going to amount to anything? Or is it the same thousand people liking and commenting over and over and it’s not actually going translate to growth for them?’” said the Liberal, who was not authorized by the party to comment publicly. 

Months later, new polls arrived that suggested no consistent boost for the NDP. The Liberals now have a much different perspective.

“It’s just outrage farming and it’s really good at driving engagement and clicks and saying, ‘Doug Ford is awful,’ but it’s not translating to support for the NDP,” the Grit insider said.

“Sometimes it feels like they’re actually helping us with their opposition and cause.”

That a seemingly popular message among certain voters would drive support to the opposition is on brand for the NDP, said a New Democrat strategist, who also spoke confidentially in order to share party insights.

“That’s one of the biggest paradoxes in Ontario politics for Marit and the NDP,” the strategist said, noting the problem existed long before this iteration of the party’s leadership.

“Marit is articulating what voters want to hear, but the harder task is shifting the party from, ‘Yeah, you’re right on issues,’ to, ‘We’re going to trust you to run that province,’” they said.

“So until that shift happens, the NDP can win the conversation but they’re not going to win government.”

Stiles said she is well aware that her road to power is complicated, citing support for the “status-quo parties” — the Tories and the Liberals — from “powerful forces in this country and this province.”

The NDP’s competition, she said, is supported by “wealthy people, corporations, big-time lobbyists.”

“We’re only a few blocks from Bay Street,” she said, looking out the window of her Queen’s Park office, “and, you know, Bay Street flexes a fair amount of muscle.

“Where I think New Democrats have won in the past and will win again, and where progressives win pretty much all around the world, is on the ground, in community, on the doorsteps.”

For now, the polls don’t matter to her, since Stiles has no plans to stop saying what some voters want to hear.

Nor is she backing down from her Ford “prison” comments which, it seems, needed no prompting.

“I thought I was stating something pretty obvious but it was definitely just me making that seem like an obvious thing,” she said.

“We don’t know where he will be because an RCMP criminal investigation is still underway, which I repeat — very often.”

With files from Robert Benzie