Let look at the last election to try to gauge the "ideology" or "taste" of victoria voters.
Ben Isitt, who many of this site see as being on the extreme-left, got the most votes on council at 14,729
Thornton-Joe and Alto, who I'd guess label as centre, maybe centre left depending on the issue, got about 12,000 votes each.
Loveday, another who this site sees as hard-left, managed 10,852.
Pam, a centre-left mostly single-issue nimby got 10,354.
Geoff Young, a forums favourite centrist, got about 9,000.
Lucas and Coleman got only 8000 each.
The mayor's race saw centre-left vaguely green/unaligned Helps narrowly beat out official NDP-supported Fortin mostly out of outrage about the bridge, each getting only 9,000 votes.
Chong, the closest thing to a right-wing candidate, got only 3,000 votes.
So adding up the totals into some rather unscientific and poorly defined and counted political zones:
Leftish: ~43,000
Centre-Left ~44,000
Centre & Centre-Right ~20,000
Right ~5,000 (includes candidates that didn't get elected but still drew votes)
So far all the candidates I've been seeing running against Helps fall into the right and centre-right camp. There's a lot of backlash against helps, but the question is if this backlash is large and real enough to get people to vote so far outside of their ideology, or if ideology or party tribalism plays as much as a role in local elections. My personal prediction is that the mayor's race will be close with Helps getting even lower than the previous election, but with her competition also getting very low numbers as they split the centre/right vote. A lot of the left and centre left will just not vote for her as they find her deeply uninspiring, but her competition will have too many deal-breakers to see the city's majority left voters go for them.
Local elections like this are very hard to predict though, but looking at previous elections we can see that despite the heavy amount of political self-selection on this site, Victoria as a whole is a pretty left wing city at all levels of voting.
Edited by Baro, 05 September 2018 - 09:24 AM.