Who will win? Most voters haven’t decided yet

Just over a month before Winnipeg voters choose their next mayor, the most striking number in the latest polling isn’t Scott Gillingham’s lead.

It’s the 51 per cent of voters who still haven’t decided who they’re going to vote for.

That is an enormous chunk of the electorate to have sitting on the sidelines this late in a municipal campaign. And while it may make the current standings look more uncertain than they otherwise would, it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise.

Winnipeg municipal elections have not been models of voter engagement in recent years. Turnout has been falling — from 50 per cent in 2014 to 42 per cent in 2018 and just 37.5 per cent in 2022.

Municipal politics tends to struggle for attention until voters start seeing campaign signs on their streets, hearing candidates debate issues that affect their neighbourhoods and, eventually, thinking about where they’ll put their X.

The current numbers certainly suggest many voters haven’t reached that point yet.

The Abacus Data poll has Gillingham leading former city councillor and provincial cabinet minister Kevin Klein by a considerable margin among decided voters, with 55 per cent supporting the incumbent compared with 23 per cent for Klein. Funeral director Mike Vogiatzakis has 11 per cent, while the remaining candidates collectively account for another 11 per cent.

But those numbers need a giant asterisk attached to them: to reinterate, more than half of all respondents remain undecided, while another 13 per cent say they don’t intend to vote.

That leaves an awful lot of room for this campaign to move.

To some degree, Winnipeg voters have seen this movie before. Five weeks before the 2022 election, a Free Press/CTV Winnipeg poll found that 39 per cent of voters were undecided, with another eight per cent saying they did not intend to vote.

Among decided voters, former mayor Glen Murray was sitting comfortably ahead with 40 per cent support. Gillingham was a distant second at 15 per cent.

Murray looked like the candidate to beat, but Gillingham ultimately won with about 28 per cent of the vote.

There’s another interesting wrinkle in the current numbers.

Gillingham’s 55 per cent support among decided voters is double the 27.5 per cent of the vote he received in 2022. That doesn’t necessarily mean he has suddenly transformed into a political juggernaut.

It may simply mean voters who are currently inclined to vote are having difficulty identifying a compelling alternative.

That possibility is underscored by the lack of strong second choices. Most Gillingham supporters say they don’t have another candidate in mind.

And that may be the central question of this election: not whether voters are enthusiastic about the incumbent, but whether another candidate can give undecided voters a reason to move.

Klein has only recently launched his campaign. He has promised to make Winnipeg the safest city in Canada by the end of a four-year term.

Other candidates will have their own opportunities to define what they would do about public safety, homelessness, addiction, infrastructure, taxes, transit and the city’s strained finances.

For now, the safest conclusion from the numbers is that Winnipeg voters remain largely disengaged from the mayoral campaign.

That can change quickly. The 2022 election proved that a candidate leading the field weeks before voting day can ultimately lose, although there was no incumbent in that race.

So while Gillingham is clearly in front in the latest poll, there is no reason to treat the race as settled.

With a majority of voters still undecided, the real campaign is just getting started.