On the first day of September, 2010, news reports about Toronto’s mayoralty race were dominated by matters both trivial and disconcertingly prescient. George Smitherman and Sarah Thomson complained about not getting invited to the Labour Day parade. Rocco Rossi, meanwhile, was trying to rekindle his sputtering campaign with a proposal to pass voter recall laws, an idea supported by none other than candidate Rob Ford. (A small sample poll found 73% of voters approved!)

But the main event began after Labour Day. At a press conference in the Sheraton that week, Smitherman unveiled a conspicuously conservative fiscal plan. A few days later, Ford posted his transportation platform on YouTube, the crux of which was a pledge to build a Sheppard subway down to the Scarborough Town Centre to “close the loop.” Oh yes, and cancel Transit City.

There’s an old and somewhat misleading trope that in Toronto politics, the real campaign doesn’t begin until after Labour Day because that’s when voters start to pay attention. Do they? The reality, back in 2010, was that Smitherman was a dead man walking by the beginning of September. Ford had taken a firm lead in the polls in June, precipitating an internal crisis in the Smitherman camp. Some of his advisors wanted him to tack left, others felt he should go right.

As with the 2008 global credit crisis — which only a handful of professionally pessimistic economists predicted before it was too late — just a few political insiders believed that a Ford victory in 2010 was within the realm of possibility.

There was a lot of denial. Many people — myself included — reckoned that Smitherman and his impeccably well connected, lavishly financed campaign team would succeed in arresting Ford’s ascendency before it was too late. Insiders figured that during the final two months, with the intensive scrutiny that adheres in the final laps, a sufficient number of voters would wake up to the disaster of a Ford victory and come to their senses.

Within the Smitherman camp, however, a growing number of his advisors arrived at the Labour Day turning point with a queasy feeling. Pollster Michael Marzollini’s view, which prevailed, was that Smitherman needed to move sharply right, and demonstrate that he wasn’t going to be some kind of tax-happy Liberal planning to spend like a drunken sailor (sound familiar?). Smitherman pledged to bird-dog a vigorous cost-cutting campaign, freeze taxes for a year, cancel the vehicle registration tax (even Joe Pantalone promised that too) and underwrite his transit plan using a mysterious financing formula that seemed to involve the private sector.

But his attempt to out-Ford Ford proved to be an epic disaster. No one bought it, partly because Smitherman was never especially convincing as an advocate of red meat conservatism. Why buy hamburger if it’s steak that you want?

The latest Forum poll once again raises the chilly spectre of denial, as well as Ford’s uncanny ability to capitalize on the disbelief of those who are paid to chart a path across the sprawling geography of our civic discontent.

It seems like just yesterday that we were listening to John Tory’s spin doctors confidently state, in background interviews, that Ford has “no room to grow” beyond the 20-odd percent of Toronto voters who would support a washing machine if it pledged to freeze taxes. Well, it seems he grew.

How often did we hear the Olivia Chow camp, and assorted pollsters, assure us that in a head-to-head fight, Chow takes Ford without breaking a sweat. As recently as last week, her campaign manager John Laschinger sent out an email, in the wake of the Forum poll, reiterating his fervent belief that all Chow has to do to win is split the right. But what if the reality is the converse? What if the prevailing dynamic of this election, like the last one, is that Ford splits the centre/left?

And what about the way that both the Tory and Chow camps have fixated on transit and congestion as the most dominant issue?

Here’s a heretical question: is it really? Chow has dutifully plugged away at her underwhelming bus plan as a proxy for her fiscal probity, while Tory has conjured up a wildly provisional solution premised on fantasy money and a stack of procedural “ifs” as thick as a briefing book.

Ford’s dark-matter buoyancy seems to indicate they’ve both missed the mark. Perhaps voters out there care deeply about other things, but can’t quite articulate their preoccupations to pollsters or reporters.

What’s clear is that Ford — who is quite possibly the most intensively scrutinized public figure since Richard M. Nixon — does, in fact, have “room to grow,” and no one should be in denial about that fact of electoral life for one more minute.

Recent political history should also remind us that when Ford is challenged on the policy field of his own choosing — i.e., fiscal responsibility — he wins every time, and this despite the oceans of ink spilled on fact-checking his incessant lies.

Yet maybe with Ford, it’s not really about the left-brain world of policies and platforms, nor the endless parade of tawdry revelations about his off-the-clock activities. Maybe it’s about something far more amorphous, and difficult to refute — an appeal that issues not from what he actually does, but rather from his almost mystical capacity to absorb and refract the inchoate frustrations of daily life in the big city. He’s perennially put upon, and always on the wrong side of respectable opinion: the sweaty anti-hero in the ill-fitting suit who screws up but keeps trying.

We all know someone like that. The core denial lurking at the heart of this election is that neither Chow nor Tory are willing to admit that they’re running against that guy. For reasons not clear, they’ve decided to run against someone else.

illustration by Kevin Nunez