To absolutely no one’s surprise, Eglinton-Lawrence councilor Karen Stintz announced on the weekend that she would be challenging Rob Ford in next year’s mayoral elections, bringing to three the declared candidates (the third is former Scarborough councilor David Soknacki).

Stintz, arguably the most high profile member of the current council after the brothers Ford, is clearly aiming for the political equivalent of the Goldlilocks voter: not too left and not too right. Progressive enough to be legible south of Eglinton, but conservative enough to speak the lingua franca of inner ring politics in Toronto.

Setting aside for a moment her shape-shifting views on transit investment, the two dominant electoral questions about Stintz’s candidacy are these:

One, will she split the right or will she split the left?

And two, does she track as a unifying candidate or a polarizing one?

Stintz, who has spent a lot of time around Liberals in her time as TTC chair, clearly wants to be a big tent pol, someone who can appeal both to thinking conservatives disgusted with Ford’s idiocy and antics, but also pragmatic progressives who may feel the city doesn’t need a big ideological swing back to the left, which is what Olivia Chow will be accused of.

From a strictly ideological point of view, Stintz currently situates herself somewhere slightly to the right of centre, and certainly to the left of where she was when David Miller was mayor. On paper, therefore, she is relatively well positioned to appeal to a middle-of-the-road, middle-class voter. She can tell Scarberians she gave them what they deserved – a subway – and she can tell downtowners that her next priority is the [insert euphemism here] relief line.

But I’d say Stintz, despite her positioning, remains a polarizing figure. The hard-core conservatives will paint her as a Judas. And the hard core transit activists, to the extent that they vote as a block and in meaningful numbers, will point to her flip-flop on the LRT file as evidence of opportunistic betrayal.

Soknacki, her challenger for this vast mushy tract of middle ground, is not a polarizing figure, mostly because most people don’t know him, don’t remember him, don’t have opinions on how he looks and speaks, and can’t really identify him with a specific position. The two of them can be a study in certain contrasts – he’s for the LRT, she’s for the subway; he’s a bit of a nerd; she plays the fashion card – but they are both gunning for the same theoretical voter.

It’s instructive to remember that the last candidate who sought to claim this piece of transcendent political real estate – Rocco Rossi – got smushed in a fairly ugly fashion. Like both Stintz and Soknacki, he announced very early, and then ran out of policy ammunition in a contest that requires a lot of staying power.

I’d say Soknacki runs a greater risk of meeting Rossi’s fate than Stintz, who has the benefit of a formal office and therefore many more organic opportunities to get herself in the media. But Stintz’s relatively early move hints at a serious weakness: with John Tory’s name still on everyone’s short-short list, she’s going to have to spend a lot of time persuading well-heeled backers that they shouldn’t sit on their wallets until Tory takes off his headphones and throws his hat into the ring. Given her positioning and his indecisiveness, that may be a tough challenge.

(Municipal politics aficianados will remember that Mel Lastman, when he was mayor of North York, routinely waffled about his re-election prospects, and waited until the last moment before registering, thus ensuring his opponents could never fundraise.)

It’s unlikely that Chow will get drawn into a sprint this early. And my guess is that when she does announce, she’ll continue to be as vague on some of the contentious policy issues – transit priorities, revenue tools, etc. – as she’s been in the past several months. Chow will attack Stintz for being Ford-like in her voting record. What she’ll do with Soknacki is less clear. But suffice it to say that both Chow and Ford will be heavily invested in the prospect of a binary choice next fall.

And how does Stintz stack up against the other two prospective candidates – Denzil Minnan-Wong and Shelley Carroll? Minnan-Wong has been cautiously distancing himself from Ford, but he doesn’t have much room to grow in terms of attracting voters in the political centre. Carroll’s problem is almost the mirror image of Minnan-Wong’s – she carries Miller’s flag, but is more of a centrist than Chow, and thus has little room to grow on the right. And unlike Minnan-Wong and Stintz, she can’t point to a portfolio and a track record during the current administration.

Lastly, I’d be remiss in not asking (though not answering) which candidate would fare the best if Ford is charged at some point during the campaign with a serious criminal offense relating to the alleged crack incident and its aftermath.

Stintz, for all her positional shifts, is trying to fight a war that will have two front lines. What remains to be seen is whether there are enough voters out there in no-man’s land, genuinely waiting to be rescued.

photo by Mike Beltzner