Breaking down London's election results and the new council

Well, Mayor Josh Morgan is back in the big seat after Monday's election, beating out challenger Susan Stevenson. All the city councillors who decided to run again re-elected except for Peter Cuddy, defeated by newcomer Ben Durham. There will be some new faces around the council horseshoe there, but only a third of Londoners, they actually went out to vote. A slight increase from 2022, but still something to pay attention to. Matt Brown is a former London mayor. Martin Horak is a political scientist. Both here are in the studio to chat about what this means. Thanks for coming in. Hey, happy to be here. Yeah. Let's, I guess, start with the mayoral race. Josh Morgan won. Many people thought that this was a strong challenger, Susan Stevenson, who had a lot of momentum behind her there. What do you think happened there, Mark? Well, I mean, I think in the end, probably it was a little bit about style. I suspect that Susan's leadership style or campaigning styles may be just a little bit too confrontational for people these days, and I think that might have turned a few folks off. And folks went with the safer bet, somebody who's already got experience. Now, it wasn't a landslide, right? But it was a convincing win, or almost 20% difference between Josh Morgan and Susan Stevens. Yeah, looking at the numbers there too, Josh seemed to really maintain the votes that he had last time by a raw data set here. I'm wondering, Matt, what you make when you look at these results? Well, it's hard to talk numbers on the radio, but I'm going to. I dove down a little bit into these numbers, and it's very interesting because Morgan received 45,000 votes in the 2022 election. He received 45,000 votes in the 2022 election, but voter turnout went way up. And so when you look at those numbers, there wasn't any growth. He went from 65% support to 45% support. And also, if you look at the over-under, if you look at the votes that councillors received versus what Josh Morgan received, he received far fewer votes citywide than the cumulative number of votes that council received. So in a way, at the municipal level, I see this as a bit of a minority government. In other words, he's going to have to lean in on council a whole lot more over the course of the next four years. That's fascinating, considering strong mayor powers exist and whether those come into play later on here. I want to talk about Susan Stevenson here for a sec there. On the debate stage. And one of them, I believe, was the Rogers debate. She talked about how when she was a city councillor, she had to be confrontational, oppositional. The idea of how you act as a councillor and how you would act in the mayor's seat is different. It is a change. And you spoke about leadership style there, Martin. I'm wondering if that's one of those tough parts where if you're running for mayor, how do you show who you'll be if voters know who you are? Well, exactly. Yeah, I think that's maybe something that people weren't quite convinced by. And being a mayor is really challenging in a nonpartisan system, right? You can have strong mayor powers, but you still don't have a party platform and people who are necessarily loyal to you in a partisan way. So you still got to build that consensus, you know, unless you want to always be using your mayoral vetoes and that's going to burn your political capital real quick, right? So mayors have to be consensus builders. I wonder too, when we look at the support that Stevenson did have, is this something where as a mayor, you try and find out how you connect with those people throughout the next four years as well. What do you do about the fact that you have a strong challenger whose opinions were shared, but not supported overall, Matt? Well, I think that, pardon me, there's always going to be a 30% or so portion of a population that's going to vote a certain way. And that's really what Susan picked up. She picked up, I think, about 20%, 26% of the vote. Paul Chang, for example, in 2014, picked up 32% of the vote. So you're going to get people who are voting against the city, voting against the municipality, and voting against a city council. I think that's all she was able to pick up. And so if I was in Josh Morgan's seat right now, I really wouldn't worry about that. I'd be thinking about what does the majority of the city want, the 75% of the folks that didn't vote for Susan Stevenson, and how can I connect with them? How can I lead the city forward? I want to talk about council here. the incumbent councillor who lost, Peter Cuddy, losing his seat in the city's northeast, the only incumbent not to be re-elected. What did you make of the campaigns when you were watching those two, the race out there? Is there anything that you pull from this race that leads you to believe someone did something right? Well, I mean, someone clearly did something right, because incumbents are hard to beat. You know, we know this in our political science research, there's a huge incumbency advantage for various reasons, right? So it's always interesting to see when an incumbent is beaten. And I think, you know, Ben Durham had a really good on-the-ground organization. If you are a non-incumbent and you want to beat an incumbent, you got to go flat out for like three months, knocking on every door, making sure everybody knows your name, because otherwise they can't vote for you, right? And that's exactly the sort of thing that he did. And that's exactly the sort of thing that every challenger has to do if they're going to be successful. Yeah, when we had Ben Durham, who won that race, Mayor or Councillor-elect, it weren't three on the show yesterday. He did talk about how he thought he had an advantage because he could get out and knock on doors early. Matt, I'm wondering, you know, we've heard a lot too about, oh, the social media campaign, ad buys, that might be a way that shifts elections. The power of the door knock, what does that represent? Oh, everything. You have to work as hard as you possibly can. You have to get out to every door at least twice, maybe three times. That was true in 2010 when I did it and I beat Walt Monk, an incumbent, way back then. It's just as true today. Also, social media was emerging back in those days and it's a big deal these days. It's not one or the other, it's both ends. And so what I would consider social media being is you're basically mainstreaming in the new fashion way. One of the things that Durham talked about there yesterday as well is the idea that he hopes that council will have less in-fighting, that this council might not see those 8-7 splits the way that it has in the past. I'm wondering what you make of that, Martin. Well, it's going to be one of the most interesting things to watch for. I mean, there's been a bit of a shift in the center of gravity, I think, now. There's a couple of really strongly, I would say, progressive councillors that have been elected, and that's going to change the dynamic. But every time you get a new council, You know, there's the first couple of months or so when they're kind of working out what they actually think about issues because and what they think of each other and who they can work with. Right. So we're going to see where that lands. Yeah. The idea of how do you build up allies? How do you lean into each other and figure out where your lines are? But the next couple of months are busy, too. This is a budget now that you've got to go and piece together. Matt, what does that look like to get onboarded as a new councillor and then try and figure out how you're going to keep those promises on affordability? Yeah. I mean, that's the trick, isn't it? And so Mayor Morgan has an opportunity here to get to know the new councillors, to bring them on board, to understand what's important to them, and then to balance that out with the councillors that he's very familiar with and very familiar with working. I think that the key here is to look at that deputy mayor position and appoint a different deputy mayor. I think that would go a long way in terms of bringing council together because you can find somebody in the center or a little bit left, and that would bring in some allies in your direction too. What does a deputy mayor do? Why is that so valuable in that position? For some, they might know, but that deputy mayor, what does that position hold that makes it so valuable as a chip? well to them they make about ten thousand dollars more than uh another counselor um to the community i think that it really it's just a symbol and so you act for the mayor when the mayor's not available uh and then you also have the ability to influence you know um influence the community in different ways just by way of the position and then also uh you have some different positions on council yeah it committees all these things i think the behind not behind the scenes but the other set of meetings that always go on beyond the city council meeting as well, eh? Yeah, yeah. I mean, deputy mayors can, you know, help to set the agenda, right? Because they're on all these committees, they're involved heavily in, you know, setting the council agenda. But it's all really about, a lot of that stuff is a little informal. It's not written down. In fact, you know, last year, when I was on a task force, we were talking about some governance stuff, we were talking about, maybe the city should write this down a little bit more, because every deputy mayor is a little different. And some of them have a lot more power than others. So that's about the relationship with the mayor as well. And that goes back to what Matt was just saying. The mayor has to pick a deputy mayor that's going to help build the consensus and that the mayor can work with. We keep talking about the mayor, so I want to stick there. Josh Morgan gets reelected as an incumbent in a province that everywhere else, a lot of other places said, I do not want what we had. Windsor, Sarnia, Chatham, Hamilton, Mississauga. You can go to a lot of city councils starting in the new year and see new mayors in seats. What do you make of that? there is also a big counter example, Toronto, right? Where a lot of people thought that Olivia Chow was going down and she not only hung on, but did so convincingly. But yes, we've had a lot of incumbent mayors lose more than average. I think partly that's about economic dissatisfaction in some places because, you know, some places like, you know, places like Windsor and Hamilton have really suffered, right? And it puts people in a bad mood and they're like, well, maybe we'll try somebody else, right? And the other thing is, again, it goes back, I think, a little bit to leadership style we see a lot of mayors going down who have been pretty confrontational and i think people are not looking for that right now what do you make matter looking around there and seeing all these names uh off to the other side london was on track if you asked me on october First, what would happen I would say that Mayor Morgan would lose his position and there was Morgan Campaign 2.0 that kicked into gear just after that uh I believe he hired Sagecom which is a fantastic communication company here in London and things really turned around so what was very, very interesting to me is that the community was interested in change. There was that theme and you could feel it in the air. And for the first time in a long time, I saw an incumbent mayor run on a campaign of We Can Do Better, of We Can Change. He presented that opportunity. It's also a function of Susan Stevenson's campaign, which was based on, I think, on fear and negativity. You really want to run on what you can do, how you can bring a city forward, not what's wrong with a community that you want to represent that's interesting and having that decision made whether they do you say to switch up your campaign uh on October 1st or beyond that how is that what does that say I guess about reactive uh or the ability to be reactive in a position like that or how important it is as a campaign to be reactive to what you have as far as the conversation at the door yeah you have to be reactive you have to be adaptive right because in most municipal environments, you kind of, it's hard to judge the public mood until you start getting out there, until the campaign starts, right? We have, you know, despite CBC and everybody, there's a little less media coverage than there might be of, you know, provincial politics. There's not that kind of constant scrutiny. Again, there's not the parties to give everybody cues, right? And so everybody, whether they're running for the first time or as an incumbent, they have to figure that out and they have to be flexible. one of the things that we heard um as well was the idea and and Ben brought this up I'm not you know it's not the Ben Durham hour here but he had an interesting point that he made there yesterday um where he talked about going to the doors what he thought was the issue surprised him and that it brought his campaign into a different light um how much does that uh part of your the idea of beating an incumbent uh to stick on that of knowing what people are talking about and finding ways to reach them where they are. Oh, it's essential. So there's no such thing as a small issue in a municipal election, especially when you're running as a city councillor. If it matters to the street, it should matter to you. If it matters to the neighborhood, it should matter to you. You can pick up on all of those things as you're going door to door and getting to know the community that you're hoping to represent. With regard to the Morgan campaign and that pivot, that was a rabbit out of a hat. When you find yourself explaining you're losing. And he was explaining a lot in early October. Then he was able to pivot and speak a little bit more about vision. And if you noticed in the photos, he would surround himself with popular counselors. And so when you're way out ahead, you don't need to do that. What he was doing was really doing, pulling out every stop to try and make this a successful campaign for himself. Yeah, there is an important distinction here between mayoral campaigns and council campaigns though right because in mayoral campaigns i think of course it's connecting to what people want but it's also about the big picture vision right in ward council campaigns it's all about what does the local community want and sometimes i think uh new people who are running for ward council they come in with big ideas and they have to learn at the door that's it's really the small stuff that counts for many people uh when we talk about the small stuff something that people may have thought was small but might have ended up playing out uh bigger in this election was the ward boundary shifts and the changes there. We heard a lot of conversations from folks saying, you know, I'm in a new ward. I've got to figure out who I've got. I got to relearn the people who are engaged. But for councillors as well, it meant you had a new neighborhood all of a sudden that was popping in. What do you make about that? Oh, it's interesting. I mean, first of all, the folks who ran as incumbents, but in shifted wards were generally successful, right? So Corrine Rahman, for example, right? So there is that kind of, you know, recognition that I think shifts with people, even despite the boundaries. But I think it is an uphill struggle for people who especially it's it kind of gives the incumbents a bit of a disadvantage, right? Because they already have familiar territory and now they need to relearn. That idea of going around and figuring out where your ward is knocking on those doors and the decisions that you have to make when you are putting together a campaign, you have enough time to figure that out. Is that where when you're an incumbent, you're thinking, OK, I've got to start focusing on the people I'm about to represent then? Yeah, I think so. I also think that in 2022, so any incumbent that returned to office, that was a bit of a pass, right? It was not a difficult election to win in many cases. There was very low voter turnout. And in terms of candidates putting their names forward, there was a smaller number there as well. I think that even the incumbents worked much harder this time around than in 2022. And so just by nature of that, you're going to get to know the neighborhoods. So we have our council set. We have folks who are sitting inside of chairs, traffic, construction, congestion, massive issues that folks have here. Some of these problems, though, are federal or provincial problems. When you look at what London has, what do you think that relationship with upper levels of governments is considering the mandate that they have? What can they go to those upper levels of government with the information from the campaign and say, hey, this is what we need? Well, this is always a struggle, right? because I think it's in kind of an asymmetrical relationship. But I think mandates matter, right? And so, you know, Josh Morgan has a pretty convincing mandate here. And so he can go to the feds and to the province with a renewed sense of, hey, I'm representing the community, right? But I think the first important thing is for council to kind of figure out its strategic priorities and set a bit of that vision thing that it can get into those relationships and negotiations with, because otherwise it's just small potatoes, right? No, it's a good point, right? you know which direction you're going to before you go and ask for a couple bucks. But when Mayor Morgan goes to the federal or provincial government, they'll have a relationship with him that they may not have had with these other mayors. And they'll have a relationship with him because he's the first one to be re-elected in a long time. The value there? Yeah, there's a bit of a shift also. When you think about election cycles, the provincial election is going to come before the next municipal election. And so that shifts the power a little bit towards municipalities, Not just a single municipality, but a large group of them. And so the first thing that I think that municipalities across southwestern Ontario and all of Ontario ought to do is focus on homelessness. This is a mistake that the past council term tried to make, trying to solve homelessness in London with the whole of community approach and the 15 hubs that were impractical. And to say, look, let's get together a group of mayors, let's get together a group of councils, and let's bring this problem to the Ontario government. and to say, listen, this is a healthcare issue, this is a provincial issue, and you need to really invest in this, and you need to support us in our work. Yeah, I mean, I think that is important because it's all about the collective action, if you're going to make a dent with the province. But I also wouldn't hold my breath about this province's, this particular provincial government's response to those issues. So I think it might be a little bit of an uphill battle to try to kind of get the province to really take this thing on, because the province is happy to say, look, it's really about local issues. Speaking of uphill battle here, we just talked about local municipal politics for about 20 minutes on this show. 30% of people voted. What do we do to get that number up? Oh boy, I just hope it's not a dead cat bounce, right? 25% last time, 31% this time. It's what happens in between elections, which is the most important thing. the city needs to really focus on why they matter why the 110 services and programs that are offered matter to Londoners and to motivate people to vote and let's be clear this isn't just a London issue uh this is this is throughout uh but when i see some of the places where the elections has shifted to online voting and are there ideas that London should be exploring i know the ranked ballot like they've looked at things in the past but um and that was shut down yeah right and so how much control does a city really have in trying to make that change? Yeah, I mean, I think a city has a little bit of control, but there's a lot of bigger kind of factors at play as well. And as Matt said, it's really about kind of showing that you are working with and for the community between elections. Listen, in Tilsonburg, you can call in your vote on the telephone. In Ingersoll, you can mail it in. London can do better. All right. Thank you both for joining us this morning to talk about an election that certainly has some results that will lead to a new look on council there. Matt Brown, the former mayor of London, and a writer with Loon, London Ontario Online News, and Matt Martin Horak, a political scientist at Western University. Thanks for joining us. Thanks very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.