Volunteers work at Rob Ford's campaign headquarters on Tuesday. Less than a week from election day, the race for mayor between Mr. Ford and George Smitherman could come down to which candidate has the more effective get-out-the-vote strategy.
Earl Provost is a little bit in awe of the Smitherman campaign's get-out-the-vote machine.
"If George wins this, it'll be because of his organization," he said. "He has an amazing ground game."
Mr. Provost knows of what he speaks: He's a rare Liberal hack on staff at the Rob Ford campaign, a Paul Martin organizer who is now co-chairing Mr. Ford's all-important "E-day" efforts.
Pulling the vote on election day always matters, but rarely has it mattered as much as it will in Toronto on Oct. 25.
Every poll released in the past week shows the front-runners are in a statistical dead heat, including an Ipsos-Reid/Global News poll of 500 Torontonians conducted Oct. 15-17 and released Tuesday.
"It's going to come totally down to who can get their vote out," said pollster Darrell Bricker of Ipsos-Reid. "Who's got the best network of drivers? Who's got people on the phone banks making sure people have voted? It'll come down to a very mechanical process."
Both leading camps undoubtedly have the mechanics in place. Their efforts helped drive a massive increase in turnout at the advance polls, where 77,397 people cast their ballots early, up from 42,413 in 2006 and 42,599 in 2003.
But there is a key difference: Mr. Smitherman's E-day push is believed to be more professional and quarterbacked by seasoned veterans, while Mr. Ford's relies more on highly motivated, but green staff and volunteers.
"We built our own team," said Michael Diamond, Mr. Ford's 25-year-old director of operations.
That team is relying on at least 1,500 of the 3,000 volunteers in their database to pitch in on election day. They've been training their new recruits bit by bit for months. But this week the campaign is running E-day school every night at 7 p.m. at Ford headquarters, a gutted Swiss Chalet on Dixon Road in Etobicoke.
They have captains in every ward overseeing volunteers who will call and visit identified Ford supporters, driving them to the polls next Monday if necessary. They'll be sending voting reminders by text message too.
"We have a lot of supporters that do have cars and have already offered to drive people to polling stations," said Stephen Neirinck, 23, Mr. Ford's volunteer chair. This is his first political campaign.
Mr. Provost has a healthy respect for the operators pulling the vote for Mr. Smitherman, including Tom Allison, his opponent's election-day director. He called Mr. Allison "talented" half a dozen times in an interview.
Mr. Allison has been a Liberal organizer since David Peterson's campaigns in the early 1980s. He ran Michael Ignatieff's leadership campaign and was the election-day point-person in Barbara Hall's 1997 campaign.
"He's as skilled a hand as you could possibly hope to have on E-day and on get-out-the-vote efforts," said Liberal strategist Scott Reid, who has known Mr. Allison since they worked together in the early 1980s. "[Mr. Allison's]success would be his ability to identify the vote and to know what works and what doesn't work when it comes to getting that vote to the polls."
Evidence of that work is pinned to the violet walls of Mr. Smitherman's Scarborough campaign office. Election-day sign-up sheets list dozens of pencilled-in names and available shift times, many of them committing to spending 13 hours on campaign grunt work.
Square in the campaign's sights are "soft" Joe Pantalone voters - anyone who would normally opt for the left-leaning deputy mayor but whose queasiness about Mr. Ford might make them think twice.
The Smitherman campaign was mum about the specifics of its tactics for Monday. But as with their aggressive advance-voting campaign, which targeted the city's ethnic communities and specific regions - Mr. Smitherman emphasized North York at a meeting with The Globe's editorial board earlier in October - this campaign will be highly decentralized and as targeted as feasible.
Mr. Smitherman eschews the term "machine" when it comes to mobilizing voters on Monday. The real machine, he said, was their advance-voting campaign, which he's convinced contributed to the high turnout at the advance polls. Targeting ethnic communities and specific geographic regions of the city was key. "In a city like Toronto, you organize by community. … And, in some cases, language by language."
Mr. Pantalone's campaign, meanwhile, has its work cut out as it tries to counter Mr. Smitherman's message.
"We're just going to go out there, pound the pavement, meet people and let them know there is an option to vote for something," said campaign spokesman Mike Smith. "You can vote out of hope, you can vote with your conscience and you can still take part in a democracy, because Joe Pantalone is still here speaking for the city."
Kelly Grant