Most Mississauga residents describe the current mayoral campaign as mostly mean-spirited or a mix of respectful and mean-spirited following a heated debate last week, according to a poll from Liaison Strategies.
Three-quarters of residents said personal comments or insults are unacceptable during an election campaign, and just under a third said the race has featured mostly personal attacks. About 30 per cent said there was a mixture of personal and policy, while 17 per cent said it had been mostly fair political debate.
A simmering tension between the two front-runners in the race, current mayor Carolyn Parrish and former mayor Bonnie Crombie, boiled over on Thursday night with Parrish responding to fierce attacks on her activeness as mayor from Crombie by calling her a “blond bombshell.” The poll was conducted in the two days after the debate, which has been shared widely in clips online.
“It’s interesting that people are picking up on it,” said Liaison Strategies principal David Valentin. “We know that people aren’t watching debates as much but they are getting clips. They are seeing little snippets. The campaigns themselves are promoting video that is aggressive and that is confrontational.”
But as much as people say they don’t like this kind of behaviour from their elected officials, Valentin said, their actions may indicate otherwise.
“Voters routinely tell us that they hate negative campaigning and hate negative ads. And yet nothing is more effective than negative ads,” he said.
With the race tightening to become a three-way race as current councillor Alvin Tedjo gains in recent polls, Valentin said candidates may ramp up the attacks.
“Some of these same folks who are saying it’s unacceptable to do these insults and comments are going to vote for candidates who have been at least a little bit nasty,” he said.
While 45 per cent say they have supported the same candidate throughout, 13 per cent have shifted allegiances and 11 per cent have gotten off the fence to pick a candidate, according to the poll. Advance voting starts Oct. 6.
Liaison polled a random sample of 1,000 Mississauga residents between Oct. 2 and Oct. 4 using interactive voice recording technology, dialing both cellphones and land lines. The margin of error is 3.1 percentage points, or 19 times out of 20.
