You need imagination to be a mayoral candidate. You need to be able to imagine solutions to the city’s problems, and that you’re a key part of implementing them. You need to imagine what it is like to live in different parts of the city, and ways to communicate with people in all those places. And if the polls are looking grim, you have to be able to imagine a way you still might win.

So let’s imagine a scenario that might be running through the minds of David Soknacki and his campaign team as they see him polling in fourth place, with only 6 per cent support, more than seven months into his campaign for mayor of Toronto. The chorus of people suggesting it’s pointless for him to keep his name on the ballot is already loud, and will only get louder now that Karen Stintz has left the race.

Soknacki’s modest support so far, even though he is a conservative by disposition, comes from the centre-left of the political spectrum: urbanists, transit enthusiasts, and anti-populist policy geeks who might otherwise vote for Olivia Chow. Anecdotally, it appears that if Soknacki has room to grow, it might come at the further expense of Chow.

If you accept that premise, you might see a slim ray of hope for Team Soknacki in the most recent polls. Because, while he hasn’t been moving up, Chow has been losing ground to John Tory, trailing him in a series of surveys after months at the front of the pack. With Stintz taking leave of the race in a week when Chow was dealing with bad press over a campaign volunteer on Twitter, we might expect to see Tory’s number continue to grow.

People who have been supporting Chow might look at that dynamic and decide the horse they picked can’t run and start looking at Soknacki as an alternative. If he then suddenly starts surging in the polls, the momentum could attract dollars, volunteers, and votes as he and Tory battle it out for the anti-Ford vote.

It’s far-fetched, perhaps, but not unimaginable. And it’s not as if there are no precedents for come-from behind victories.

Soknacki’s team is quick to remind people often that Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi was in third place at 8 per cent in the polls just one month before his own first victory. Closer to home, David Miller’s 2003 momentum came as Babara Hall supporters abandoned her when she stalled after months of leading every poll. Hall herself was a distant third place (and being written off as an also-ran by commentators) in a poll published in the Star less than three weeks before her landslide victory over incumbent Toronto mayor June Rowlands in 1994.

In his 1972 victory speech, Tiny Perfect Mayor David Crombie said he’d almost dropped out of the race after coming to believe he couldn’t win, midway through the campaign.

So municipal political miracles have been known to happen, even at the last minute.

But the last minute is approaching in this campaign. We’re still two months from election day — a period longer than any entire federal or provincial campaign — but we’re also seven long months into this thing. Soknacki told the Star’s David Rider last weekend that his personal debt for this election is well into the six figures, and he and his team of volunteers are working long hours. At some point, they may need to make a tough decision to cut their losses.

But I’m glad they haven’t made it yet. Soknacki’s campaign has been the most thoughtful and thorough in its approach to policy, putting subjects (the Scarborough LRT, the police budget, TTC service improvements, and others) on the agenda before other candidates responded in kind, and setting the bar for reasonable debate.

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His intelligence and detailed proposals have sometimes steered journalists covering the campaign toward deeper policy discussions, and made the other candidates better in response.

As the campaign kicks into gear for real after Labour Day, Toronto can only benefit from a few more weeks, at least, of Soknacki’s presence in the discussion.

The deadline for candidates to withdraw and take their names off the ballot is Sept. 12. Maybe then it’ll be time. But until he does, there’s still time for his supporters to imagine a miracle, and convince the rest of Toronto to pray for it to happen.