Watching Toronto’s 2026 mayoral race through two lenses: campaign strategist and voter
I spend much of my professional life thinking about the distance between a decision and the people expected to understand it, trust it or act on it.
Elections make that distance unusually visible.
From the campaign side, a race can look like architecture: research, positioning, policy, audience analysis, message development, media, field operations, fundraising, digital, events, rapid response and a hundred decisions about where attention should go next.
From the voter side, almost none of that architecture is visible.
I see a headline while making breakfast. A debate clip. A sign at an intersection. Something a friend sends to a group chat. A candidate answering one question particularly well—or particularly badly. Maybe I read a platform. Maybe I do not.
That gap between the campaign that is designed and the campaign that is actually experienced is what I find most interesting about Toronto’s mayoral race.
This is not an endorsement of any candidate, nor an attempt to score the race. I am interested in the machinery underneath it: how campaigns attempt to move people from an abstract public choice toward a personal decision, and what happens when that theory encounters actual voters.
The framework I use in my own communications work is simple:
DECISION → AUDIENCE → MESSAGE → MOVEMENTThe Decision Line →Start with the decision. Understand the people who have to make it. Build the communication around what they need to understand, believe or resolve. Then ask whether the communication produced movement.
A municipal election is an unusually useful place to test that framework because the outcome is explicit. Eventually, people either participate or they do not, and those who participate make a choice.
But the simplicity of the ballot can hide how complicated the path to it really is.
My working proposition is this: a campaign is a hypothesis about public behaviour under constraints. It is a theory about what people are paying attention to, what matters enough to influence them, what they will believe, what they will dismiss, what they need to see from a candidate and what might finally move them to act. Strategy is the process of making that hypothesis explicit enough to test.
Campaigns are often discussed as if they are primarily communications operations: advertisements, speeches, social media, signs, debates and press coverage.
Those things matter. But they sit downstream from a more fundamental question:
What decision is the campaign trying to make easier for the voter?
That is different from asking what the candidate wants to say.
A campaign may have dozens of policies, a compelling biography and a sophisticated media operation. None of those automatically create a clear proposition in the mind of a voter. The strategic work is the translation between them.
This is why I think of a campaign as a decision system before I think of it as a content system. The communications are not the strategy. They are evidence of the strategy.
When the strategy is clear, individual activities tend to accumulate. A policy announcement reinforces a larger argument. A debate answer sounds consistent with what came before it. A neighbourhood visit makes sense inside the candidate’s broader story. An unexpected issue can be addressed without making the campaign feel as if it has suddenly become someone else.
When that underlying logic is weak, a campaign can be extraordinarily busy and still feel incoherent.
Activity is not strategy.
At the most literal level, the decision in a mayoral election is straightforward: choose a candidate.
Strategically, it is more complicated.
Campaigns are also competing to define what the election is about.
Is the central question affordability? Housing? Transit? Public safety? City services? Taxes? Competence? Change? Continuity? Trust? The future shape of Toronto?
A candidate does not control that conversation. Neither does the media. Neither do voters. The issue environment emerges from the interaction among all of them, alongside events that no campaign controls.
Political communication theory has long described agenda-setting: the idea that public attention is shaped not only by the positions people hold, but by which issues become prominent enough to organize the conversation. That matters in a campaign because you can have an answer to a question the electorate is not currently asking.
A strategically coherent campaign therefore needs more than a platform. It needs a theory of the election itself: which problems are likely to organize voter judgment, where the candidate has something credible to say, and which questions should not be allowed to pull the campaign away from its central proposition.
This is also why strategy cannot be a communications calendar written months in advance. The environment changes. The strategic question is whether the campaign can adapt to what is happening without abandoning what it is trying to mean.
The word audience sounds neat. Toronto is not.
People can live in the same city while experiencing very different versions of it.
One person experiences Toronto through a subway commute. Another through whether the bus shows up. Another through rent. Another through property taxes. Another through a small business trying to survive construction. A parent with a stroller, a cyclist, a delivery driver and a person waiting for Wheel-Trans can stand on the same street and encounter four different public systems.
All of them are voters. They are not necessarily having the same political conversation.
That is why useful segmentation is not simply demographic. It is about a person’s relationship to the decision: what they experience, what they stand to gain or lose, what they believe is working, where they feel risk and what evidence they trust.
I am not arguing that campaigns should reduce people to data profiles. The opposite. Segmentation is useful only when it helps us stop pretending that an electorate is psychologically or materially uniform.
The deeper strategic challenge is coalition.
A citywide candidate needs to connect people whose priorities may be different without making the central message so broad that it means nothing. That is not solved by producing a different advertisement for every group.
Segmentation tells you where the differences are. Strategy tells you what can still hold them together.
This is where campaigns collide with the reality of attention.
The campaign team may have a forty-page platform. The voter may know three things about it.
The campaign may see an elegant narrative developing across months of announcements. The voter may have seen Tuesday’s clip and Thursday’s headline.
That does not mean voters are unserious. It means communication arrives inside real life.
One of the hardest tasks in political strategy is therefore compression without distortion: reducing complexity enough that an idea travels, without simplifying it so far that the policy becomes meaningless.
This is also where the difference between having a position and owning an issue becomes important. Political science uses the idea of issue ownership to describe the associations voters build between political actors and particular issues. In a non-partisan municipal contest the mechanics are different from a party election, but the strategic principle still travels: publishing a policy does not mean people will associate you with the problem or trust you to address it.
That association is built through accumulation.
The interview, the announcement, the debate answer, the validator, the door conversation, the short video and the response to an unexpected event should not sound identical. But ideally they leave the same strategic residue.
Message discipline is not saying one sentence forever. It is making sure many different communications continue to mean the same thing.
The final word in the Decision Line is movement, and elections make the distinction brutally clear.
A campaign can generate enormous attention without creating relevance. It can create relevance without creating confidence. It can generate positive feeling without creating urgency. It can have supporters who do not vote.
Toronto’s recent turnout makes this more than a theoretical point. In the 2022 municipal election, 563,124 ballots were cast from 1,898,750 eligible voters—about 30 per cent turnout. In the 2023 mayoral by-election, 725,333 ballots were cast from 1,947,242 eligible voters—about 37 per cent.
For a strategist, that means the job is not simply to ask, Who supports us?
It is also: Who knows us? Who sees the election as relevant? Who believes we are credible? Who can still be persuaded? Who intends to participate? Who actually follows through?
Those are not the same populations, and they do not necessarily require the same intervention.
Persuasion and mobilization are different strategic problems. So are awareness and trust. Treating all four as a single communications objective is how campaigns end up celebrating impressions while wondering why behaviour did not move.
Movement is not visibility. It is a change in the probability of an action that matters.
There is a problem with analyzing an election entirely from the strategist’s chair: I also get a ballot.
And when I think as a voter, much of the machinery disappears.
I am not asking whether the campaign has successfully implemented its message architecture.
I am asking: Do you understand the city I experience? Can you explain what you would actually do? Do you understand the trade-offs? Do you distinguish between what the City controls and what requires another government or institution? Can you tell me why this should be a priority now?
And then there is a question that campaign communications sometimes understates:
Do I believe you could govern it?
The voter is not only evaluating promises. The voter is forming an impression of execution.
Can this person make decisions when interests conflict? Can they build coalitions? Can they explain a difficult choice? Can they communicate when something goes wrong? Can they hold a position under pressure and still recognize when the evidence has changed?
In other words, I am not only imagining the candidate.
I am imagining the administration.
On paper, campaign strategy can look almost linear.
Research the electorate. Identify the issue environment. Segment audiences. Develop the proposition. Build messages. Allocate resources. Persuade. Mobilize. Turn out.
Then human beings arrive.
We care deeply about an issue and still may not vote. We say we want detailed policy and consume politics through short clips. We dislike negative campaigning and still remember the attack. We can agree with a policy but distrust the messenger. We can like a candidate and doubt their capacity to execute.
People make political decisions with information, identity, experience, trust, emotion, memory and social cues operating at the same time.
A campaign is therefore not persuading against a blank slate. It is entering lives already full of experience and prior judgment.
That messiness is not a failure of strategy. It is the reason strategy is necessary.
The campaigns I find most interesting are not necessarily the loudest.
I watch for coherence.
Can I identify what the campaign believes this election is about? Do the policies support that proposition? Does the candidate’s behaviour reinforce it? Do the validators make sense? Does the media strategy add to it? When something unexpected happens, does the response still feel like it came from the same strategic centre?
This matters because campaigns operate under constant pressure to react. There is always another story, poll, criticism, endorsement, viral moment, announcement or demand for a response.
Adaptability matters. But adaptation is not the same as drift.
The discipline is to change the expression when the environment changes without losing the proposition that gives the campaign meaning.
That is harder than it sounds. It is also why campaign strategy is much closer to operating a live system than executing a communications plan.
I am not interested in awarding points for individual campaign moments. I am watching the assumptions underneath them.
What does each campaign appear to believe the election is about?
What kind of coalition is it trying to assemble, and is there a coherent proposition connecting the parts?
Which ideas survive the journey from policy document to headline to doorstep to group chat?
Which communications build memory rather than merely generating content?
How do campaigns respond when the environment moves against their assumptions?
And when the campaign asks for trust, does it offer enough evidence of how the candidate would actually make and communicate decisions in office?
Those questions interest me because they travel well beyond politics. Institutions face the same challenge whenever they need people to understand, accept, support or act on a consequential decision.
Election Day will eventually answer one question: which candidate received the most votes.
But the campaign can answer another question long before then: which theories of communication, trust, coalition and movement survive contact with actual people?
The strategist in me watches the architecture.
The voter in me experiences the fragments.
The real campaign happens in the gap between them.
That gap is where a polished message becomes a remembered idea—or disappears. It is where a policy becomes relevant—or remains a document. It is where visibility becomes credibility, where credibility may become participation, and where theory finally has to meet practice.
Method note. This essay is non-partisan. It analyzes campaign strategy as a communications and decision-making practice. It does not assess candidates, recommend a vote or predict the election outcome.
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Romain Williams is a strategist and communications leader working across campaigns, public affairs, reputation, crisis communications and institutional decision-making. Her work focuses on how organizations move from decision to audience, message and action.
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