Chow maintains commanding lead as Saunders, Matlow, Bailao make small gains: poll

Advance polls close as race enters final stretch As advanced polls close in Toronto’s mayoral race, hopefuls continue to make the case on why they’re a better candidate than Olivia Chow.

In less than two weeks, Torontonians will head to the polls to elect their next mayor, and according to a new poll from Liaison Strategies, Olivia Chow remains the clear front runner in the mayoral race.

Chow was favoured by 34 per cent of decided voters, according to the poll, while Mark Saunders sits in a distant second place, with 15 per cent support.

Chow’s lead did slip by 1 percentage point compared to last week’s poll, and conversely, support for Saunders was up by one percentage point.

Josh Matlow (12 per cent) and Ana Bailao (10 per cent), in third and fourth place respectively, each also gained one percentage point compared to last week’s Liaison poll.

The candidate that saw the biggest gains compared to last week was Anthony Furey, who jumped three percentage points to nine per cent, putting him in a tie with Mitzie Hunter, who saw the biggest drop in support compared to last week, when she was favoured by 11 per cent of decided voters.

Brad Bradford sits in seventh place at six per cent support, down one percentage point compared to last week.

Meanwhile, five per cent of decided voters said they planned on voting for some other candidate, according to the poll, down two percentage points from last week.

Liaison’s most recent findings are consistent with other polling data, including the latest from Forum Research, which puts support for Chow at 35 per cent, and 14 per cent for Saunders.

With less than two weeks before the mayoral election, polling data suggests that if any candidate is to seriously challenge Chow’s lead, they’d need the endorsement of another leading candidate who drops out.

Mark Saunders made that appeal last week, urging others to drop out and support him in an effort to “stop Chow,” but so far, none of the candidates have shown any signs of slowing their campaigns down.

Methodology

Liaison surveyed a random sample of 1,197 Torontonians through Interactive Voice Recording (IVR) from June 10 to June 11, 2023

Respondents were screened for voter eligibility.

Responses were weighted using demographic and geographic information to targets based on the 2021 Census.

The margin of error for survey results is plus/minus 2.83 percentage points, 19 times out of 20 for the total.