MONTREAL—There is a tide in Ontario political affairs that does not bode well for Thomas Mulcair’s New Democrats in next year’s federal election. And they may be powerless to reverse it to their advantage.

That tide was instrumental in propelling Premier Kathleen Wynne to the safe ground of a majority government last spring. By all indications, it is again at play in Toronto’s municipal campaign.

It should come as no surprise that a Forum Research poll that suggested Mayor Rob Ford was still in the running for re-election — with Olivia Chow running third — was followed by a Nanos poll that showed that John Tory had consolidated his lead on his main rivals.

For scores of Toronto voters, ousting Ford from office this fall comes before loyalty to a political brand.

For obvious reasons, the anybody-but-Ford movement is in a class of its own, as is the incumbent mayor who has inspired it. But last spring’s Ontario election demonstrated that it is not necessary for a politician to make it on the international tabloid circuit to induce voters into coalescing behind the strongest available alternative.

In the provincial campaign, the platform put forward by Tory leader Tim Hudak went a long way to convince many progressive voters to stick with the Liberals rather than risk facilitating a Conservative victory by giving their vote to the third-place NDP.

Transpose those dynamics to the federal level and you will find more than a few progressive voters willing to hold their nose next year if that is what it takes to end Stephen Harper’s reign in power.

To many, the first-place Liberals come across as a safer haven than the third-place NDP, regardless of the comparative skills of their leaders or even their respective policies.

This is a problem that may ultimately be beyond Mulcair’s fixing.

With every passing month, NDP hopes that a barrage of Conservative attack ads will chip away at Trudeau’s credibility are fading. After more than a year, they have yet to make a dent in the Liberal lead in voting intentions.

The New Democrats’ own efforts at portraying the Liberals as Conservatives in disguise are also falling short.

For most voters, equating Justin Trudeau with Harper does not add up. Even among regular NDP supporters, the impact of that message is increasingly questionable.

It did not have the kind of traction the party needed in Trinity-Spadina and Toronto Centre, two Ontario ridings where the Liberals and the NDP essentially went head-to-head in recent federal byelections.

The argument may have even less legs in a general election that will actually offer non-Conservative voters an opportunity to oust Harper from power.

But what if the decline of Olivia Chow from pre-writ front-runner to third-place also-ran, far from boding ill for the federal NDP, was a preview of what awaits Trudeau once he is in the campaign spotlight on a day-to day-basis?

The fact is that a significant number of voters have yet to come to a definitive take on Trudeau.

An Abacus poll published earlier this week pegged at more than 50 per cent the proportion of voters who either want to see more of the Liberal leader in action before they decide if he is up to the job of prime minister, or agree that he has some political growing up to do to fully qualify for the lead federal role.

The same poll showed that on the leadership traits that most matter to voters, i.e., values and judgment, Mulcair’s ratings are in the same ballpark as Trudeau’s.

In any campaign, managing expectations is a huge challenge for a frontrunner and many — possibly the majority — do not rise to it.

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But should the rookie Liberal leader stumble out of the gate, it is not a given that the NDP would have cause to uncork the champagne.

Trudeau’s Liberals are buoyed in the polls by the support of a significant number of lapsed 2011 Conservative supporters.

Should he falter under the pressures of his first campaign, those voters are more likely to go home to Harper than to move further left to support the NDP. In the last federal election in Ontario, a weak Liberal campaign actually sealed the Conservative majority

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