“Bottom line is someone from Kitchener has a tremendous advantage,” he said.

“The single most important factor in municipal politics in the absence of parties or slates, or whatever you want to call them, is: Do people know your name? Are they aware of you in some kind of sense that they know you?

“People are reluctant to vote for people they don’t think they know.”

Anna Esselment, an associate professor in the department of political science at the University of Waterloo, said municipal elections are often seen as “low information” elections, meaning that most voters don’t have much knowledge about the candidates or the issues.

In other elections where voters aren’t as informed, they can use party labels as "information short cuts" to help them with vote choice. In other words: “I have an idea of what the Liberals are about, so I’ll vote for the candidate who’s running for the Liberals.”

In municipal campaigns, candidates aren’t aligned formally with parties, so the use of cues is hampered and voters often rely simply on familiarity and name recognition, Esselment said.

Three of the four candidates vying for regional chair are what Woolstencroft refers to as quasi incumbents: Karen Redman, a Kitchener regional councilor and former Kitchener Centre MP; Rob Deutschmann, who sat on regional council during his tenure as the mayor of North Dumfries Township; and Jan d’Ailly, who served as a City of Waterloo councilor.

d’Ailly is clearly from Waterloo, and so is candidate Jay Aissa, Woolstencroft noted.

Deutschmann, who resides in North Dumfries, grew up in Kitchener, and has name recognition with his personal injury law firm, Deutschmann Law, that’s advertised on television and on Grand River Transit buses across the region.

Though Deutschmann resides in a township, he could be considered a crossover candidate – a mix of urban and rural.

“He might strike someone as not as tied to a particular geography,” Woolstencroft said.

“If we are a fully integrated community, where you are should not matter. It should be on your merits as a person,” he said. “But I think geography does matter. It always has in democratic politics.”

If there’s is an anti-region or “anti-system” vote out there, Woolstencroft said it will go to Aissa, who was an outspoken opponent of the LRT during the 2014 election.

But there’s not much getting people mad these days from a regional standpoint.

Candidates challenging for regional council positions have been taking a page from the province and talking about change that’s greatly needed, but they aren’t specifying as to what, Woolstencroft added.

“I just don’t see anything in the letters to the editor or on the call-in shows that has a generalized hate on,” he said. “Many people are happy right now.”

And, in 2018, people have lots of opportunity to be diverted. “We have many ways to spend our time, and it’s very hard to penetrate consciousness.”

"If there’s any kind of social, cultural change afoot, it’s that it’s the year of the woman," noted Woolstencroft, who was recently struck by the New Brunswick election and a number of ridings in which there were four or five women running, where all the parties had put forward women.

He also acknowledged an increase in visible minorities on this year’s municipal election ballots, however those remain cultural changes for now, not political ones.

Woolstencroft expects a great majority of incumbents will be reelected.

“We don’t have any polls … but we don’t have any burning scandal.”