You’ve got to think it’s gut-check time for the Olivia Chow campaign.

The most recent poll from Forum research shows the onetime Toronto mayoral race frontrunner in third place, behind both John Tory and Rob Ford, and down 16 points since early June. If you listen closely, you can hear the ghosts of Barbara Hall and George Smitherman and other incredible collapsing frontrunners rattling their chains around her headquarters.

Now a poll is a poll, of course, and the only poll that matters is held Oct. 27, you understand, and you just gotta keep your legs moving and go to the net, and blah, blah, blah, and so on.

But really: you add the clear trend line from multiple polls from multiple polling companies to anecdotal perceptions of a lack of enthusiasm for Chow’s campaign so far, and maybe it’s time for her to revisit her plan.

Not to panic. Not yet. But to think hard about how to turn this thing around.

Because it’s just about Labour Day, and back-to-school time generally coincides with the beginning of the real mayoral campaign, the period when Torontonians start paying attention and seriously thinking about their vote.

And as voters begin earnestly measuring up the candidates, they’ll find that Rob Ford is still in about as good shape as Rob Ford could be in, politically, capturing almost all the votes that are available to him. That’s not enough to win — at least not yet — but certainly enough to make it interesting (and enough to scare the living crap out of everyone else).

John Tory, meanwhile, is out in the lead. Not having pulled a John Tory yet, by announcing full funding for a separate religious transit system or anything like that, he suddenly appears to be the default option for anybody-but-Ford voters.

Which is awkward for Olivia Chow, because it seems a good deal of her early campaign strategy was based on convincing people that she was the only candidate who could beat Rob Ford. Suddenly, a pitch that emphasizes strategically piling on the front-running bandwagon in order to fire the Clown Mayor at all costs doesn’t help her.

Which hasn’t been her only pitch, of course. She’s introduced proposals to improve TTC bus service and revert to the LRT plan in Scarborough, inch up service levels for children and their parents, improve parks, and build affordable housing — among other things. But a lot of it that has gotten through to people feels a little like dusting off old debates (Scarborough subway!) or like small ball (Buses! Tax increases kept “around” the rate of inflation!).

And really, if I asked you to name the theme of Olivia Chow’s campaign so far, what would you say? Besides “purple,” I mean. I get the sense the theme has been “Fire Ford.” And the polls say that card may complete someone else’s full house.

Maybe worse, from the perspective of those who want to believe in her, so far she’s seemed as wooden as her proposals have seemed modest. The sometimes curt but usually quick and well-versed policy talker we knew in the past has been reduced to reading from her iPad during debates and haltingly sticking to obviously prepared talking points in interviews and scrums.

The candidate many expected Olivia Chow to be knows the files, and is passionate about them — especially about building the city up and delivering social justice to the vulnerable. They expected her not just to be “not Ford,” but to be the Anti-Ford. Someone who offers a different vision of the city — who not only knows the “value of a dollar,” but the value of the things a dollar can buy to make life better for all citizens, and the value of what citizens can do working together through their government.

It’s still early. Lots of time for Tory and Ford to make unforced errors, or for Chow to pick up ground, or even for David Soknacki to make a surge. But in revising their plans for the next two months, all the candidates will need to look at the positions they occupy at the new starting gate, and how different those are from their places in the qualifying rounds.

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And so you’d think Chow might consider throwing out the frontrunner’s script she’s been reading off her tablet and improvise a new one. A bolder vision of a city that wants to improve bus service today, yes, but is building bigger for the future.

Will she be more likely to win if she does that? I don’t know. But I know she’d be running the campaign people expected her to back when polls showed her way out in the lead.

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