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If Ford self-destructs, he has farther to fall than his party’s flag bearers in the last three elections, said Anna Esselment, an expert in Ontario politics who teaches at the University of Waterloo.

While Tory and Hudak held leads months before the start of election campaigns, by the time those races started, those leads had narrowed or disappeared entirely, she said.

“(This time) the Conservatives are starting with a much bigger lead when the campaign started,” she said. “There’s a lot more room for errors to happen.”

It’s not just the raw approval numbers that favour Ford. It’s also that the issues that seem to matter most now to Ontarians are in the populist PC leader’s wheelhouse.

“The policy issues that matter the most to the electorate also happen to be the policy planks that Doug Ford is seen to be performing much better on. If Doug Ford and the PCs remain focused on these policy planks, the PCs could hold onto their lead,” Eli Yufest, chief executive of Campaign Research Inc., wrote after his firm polled Ontario voters days after Ford was chosen leader in a hurry-up contest in March.

Three of the four issues voters identified as most important are front and centre in Ford’s campaign pitch: Make life more affordable, improve accountability and cut government waste.

When the change vote is that high, it’s very hard for an incumbent party to get around that Anna Esselment

The other issue in the top four, improving health care, seems ominous for the ruling Liberals in a province where those with mental illness can wait a week or more in ERs, those in debilitating pain can endure waits as long as a year or two for a new hip or knee, and overcrowding has become so endemic in Ontario hospitals that one of the province’s largest, the London Health Sciences Centre, started using a written hallway protocol this month that sets out when and how patients are to be moved to stretchers in hallways to free up space in ERs, surgical recovery rooms and intensive care units.