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The fudging of Ford

The Star has gone and done it.[rssbreak]

Now mofo Rob Ford actually thinks he’s got a chance to be mayor. Make that prime minister.

Hey, Ford said himself that the PM’s office is his ultimate goal. That was in the afterglow of that Star-Angus Reid poll last week showing him within “striking distance” of front-runner George Smitherman in the mayoral race.

How does that old song go? “There’s no stoppin’ us now”?

Ford’s on a roll, or at least he thinks so.

“Don’t be afraid,” Ford’s campaign manager, big brother Doug, intoned (somewhat ominously) to the press afterward, knowing full well that many Torontonians, not just the downtown literati, would be freaked at the prospect of Robbie Boy in the mayor’s chair.

What to make of all the Ford fuss? Is all this business about Ford surging into second place one big practical joke cooked up by the Star’s editors to ruin our spring?

The paper certainly seems poll-happy these days. It’s one of those devices big papers are using more often to build reader loyalty and drive traffic to their websites. A cynic might say the progressively conservative Star is trying to manufacture news.

Maybe having ordained Smitherman as front-runner in another poll many moons ago, when he was barely out of the gate, the Star’s trying to light a fire under curiously mostly absent George.

Surely the paper can’t be serious about Ford, right? A closer look tells a different story than Ford as contender.

First that poll. Scientific? Maybe. Conclusive? Hardly. Only 413 people responded, which is substantially fewer than the 1,004 respondents accepted as the industry standard for evaluating public opinion with any degree of certainty.

Also, the poll was not conducted through your typical phone calls to a representative sample of Canadians, but online, which increases the potential for skewed results.

How representative was the sample of Toronto voters? Hard to say, but chances are, not very. That’s because respondents were subscribers to Angus-Reid’s email polling. What pre-screening info is used to determine which subscribers are invited to participate in a given poll? Age, gender and city of residence are the extent of it.

Online survey results of this kind are “weighted” to arrive at a more accurate figure.

But as a tool, Canadian market researchers say online polling is a bit of a crapshoot, since the samples being used are not purely random. Ethnicity is a variable that’s often missing from the samples used. Those taking part in the surveys are also paid, further skewing the motivation to respond.

There’s also no telling how many surveyed for the Star poll, for example, were from Ford’s home turf in Etobicoke, or elsewhere outside the city core, where Ford’s penny-pinching obsessions would find favour.

The biggest number worth noting in this poll: more than half who bothered responding, 51 per cent, said they are still undecided.

And there’s the crux of the matter. If the Ford polling numbers are a true reflection of electoral sentiment – and I don’t believe they are – then it’s clear that public opinion in this mayoral race thus far is overwhelmingly mushy.

Nevertheless, the Smitherman camp was quick to pounce on the Star’s Ford numbers and declare him its main rival – clearly an attempt to marginalize his real opponent to this point, Rocco Rossi.

The danger of that tactic is that the public could start to believe that Ford is a factor. But six months away from election day, it may be a risk the Smitherman camp is willing to take to eliminate Rossi.

The Rossi campaign’s done some polling of its own. Its numbers don’t reflect so kindly on Ford. Thirty-five per cent of those surveyed have never even heard of the Etobicoke councillor.

Go figure.

enzom@nowtoronto.com

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