What went wrong for Olivia Chow?

It wasn’t suppose to happen this way for Olivia Chow.

On Monday, Chow placed third in Toronto’s mayoral election finishing with just XX per cent support.

That’s certainly not what Chow expected when she resigned as an NDP Member of Parliament back in March, and instantly became the front-runner in this race.

For much of the early spring, she was ahead in the opinion polls as the anti-Rob Ford candidate and the one who was supposed to appeal to the average, blue-collar worker.

There doesn’t seem to be a single reason – a consensus, if you will – on why Torontonians soured on Chow. There are, however, several theories.

Chow’s ‘weak’ communication skills

There are some in the media who have openly suggested that Chow’s speaking style played a key role in her electoral demise.

Essentially, some pundits suggest that Chow isn’t a strong communicator.

“Chow is campaigning in her second language. She came to Canada from Hong Kong when she was 13. She still speaks English with an accent. Cantonese is her first language,” TV Ontario host Steve Paikin wrote in a blog post last January.

"In addition, she’s not a particularly effective public speaker, which is a nice way of saying she really has yet to learn how to take an audience in the palm of her hand and move them towards a political vision or agenda."

Lisa Kirbie of the Daisy Consulting Group, suggests that Chow’s inability to communicate her platform was a major stumbling block for Team Chow.

"She was simply unable to connect with voters in a way she needed to," Kirbie, who worked on but left the Chow campaign in the summer, told Yahoo Canada News.

"She was unable to communicate a vision for Toronto that voters could respond to."

Unfortunately, if you can’t convey your message, you’re not going to have a lot of success in any election campaign.

Tactical errors in the campaign

Chow had a very impressive campaign team, led by John Laschinger, who previously ran successful races for Brian Mulroney and David Miller.

It appears that despite their impressive resumes, however, the Chow campaign team had some early blunders.

Campaign insiders shared some of those mistakes with the Globe and Mail last month.

"In part, the campaign’s problem was picking the wrong target – going after Rob Ford instead of John Tory. As well, Ms. Chow did not stake out a progressive enough place on the spectrum, and failed to get her message across, sources close to her say," noted the report.

The Globe adds that members of Chow’s campaign team had acknowledged that they were too slow to attack John Tory’s SmartTrack program, a planned 53-kilometre, surface-level rail project and one of the centrepieces of the Tory campaign.

"The Chow campaign’s largest mistake, one insider confides, was not pulling apart Mr. Tory’s transit proposal on its obvious technical problems as soon as it was released last spring."

Chow also lost two key team members during the course of the campaign: Joe Cressey ran as an NDP candidate in a federal byelection and Warren Kinsella – a respected political war room operative – left the campaign over a controversy where described John Tory’s transit plan as “segregationist.”

Kinsella apologized for the remark, but chose not to return to Team Chow.

Racism and sexism

Unfortunately, the 2014 election campaign was marred by a number of sexist and racist attacks against several municipal candidates.

Since the beginning of the campaign, Chow has been vocal condemning attacks targeted at her via Facebook and Twitter.

On Monday, Chow lashed out at the Toronto Sun for publishing a cartoon of her in a Mao-style uniform riding on the coattails of her late husband, Jack Layton.

“Because I am Chinese-Canadian, I must be a communist and have slanted eyes and glasses … and since I am a woman, I must be inferior and therefore not good enough for the job of the mayor so I must rely on my deceased husband. So it is both racist and sexist,” Chow said.

It’s hard to say how those attacks affected the campaign but it couldn’t have helped.

Left/right politics in Toronto

Finally, Chow’s left-leaning ideology may have contributed to her downfall.

Yahoo Canada News' Matthew Coutts explains that theory:

"We know from last election that Toronto post-amalgamation is far more conservative than given credit for. Once the options were laid out bare, it seems voters found Chow’s promise of a far-left alternative to Ford a little too shocking," said Coutts, who has followed the Toronto election very closely.

"It seems to me that Chow’s campaign faced its first real, unexpected test the moment Ford entered rehab. When Ford temporarily abandoned his campaign, it was the first time voters were faced with picking between Tory and Chow.

"The question at the centre of the election changed at that moment from, ‘Do you want Ford or someone else?’ to ‘Who is the someone else that you want?’ Looking at the election poll results, this is the moment that Tory’s numbers started their incline, the moment Chow stopped placing at the top of every survey. Chow’s message of being the alternative to Ford suddenly wasn’t so vital. She was suddenly fighting a nuanced battle against someone poised to reap the benefits of centrist and right-leaning voters."

The John Tory and Doug Ford camps, along with other right-leaning groups, have trumpeted the narrative that Chow is a ‘tax and spend lefty.’

The Toronto Taxpayers Coalition even launched a "StopChowNow" sign campaign.

"We must make sure Olivia Chow never becomes the Mayor of Toronto. Our city cannot survive a mayor who makes David Miller look like a fiscal moderate," the group says on its website.

"The left is pulling out all the stops to recapture the city and restore a tax and spend socialist government. This is a scary prospect."

Ultimately, a fiscal conservative ideology has again won the day in Toronto.

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