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This week in The Incline:

• Reporting delays

• Mapping the mayoral election

• Election night blues

• What now?

Reporting delays

Chris jolts awake, scattering Halloween candy wrappers and Gordon Lightfoot albums as he shakes his head violently.

“What in the hell day is it!?” he yells to no one, the sound of his voice echoing off the sterile white walls of the room in which he finds himself.

He looks around, confused by the cold space where he now lays. A television plays an endless loop of CNN anchors calling US midterm results. A projector noisily slides through posts from Polling Canada about the federal by-elections. The Nvidia logo is pasted to the ceiling, a sloppy red X drawn through it in dripping red paint. A computer sits on a table, showing nothing but error messages from Outlook.

There, at the end of the bed, appears a jet black monolith. He reaches out his hand, caked in drying chocolate, stretching helplessly for the cuboid. And as he carries on with this pathetic attempt to connect with the plinth of humanity before him, the sound of distant wailing grows louder and louder until finally…

Cut to black.

Hamilton’s municipal election wrapped up over two weeks ago.

I’ve spent a better part of the intervening days in a fog, struggling to form even half-coherent thoughts about the outcome.

This is the seventh draft of an edition on the election, with each of the previous ones deleted thanks to having the wrong tone or the wrong focus or just being rambling nonsense. More so than normal, that is.

I’ve oscillated wildly between confusion, anger, and mourning. Confusion because I genuinely don’t know what this new world will bring us, anger because of the missed opportunities, and mourning because, even though much is still uncertain, the one thing that’s clear is that everything is going to be very different now.

We seem poised to a return to a world we struggled for years to put behind us.

A not insignificant reason why writing about this election has been a challenge is because it so dramatically defied my expectations.

I had a strong inkling that Keanin Loomis would win the mayoral election, given Andrea Horwath’s litany of problems and late start to the 2026 race, Rob Cooper’s relatively unknown status, and the sheer strength of Loomis’s campaign organization this time around.

But I didn’t expect how strong the reactionary vote would be this time around.

After the Spec and CBC profiles of candidates came out, each ward’s Cable 14 debate was done, and I had done research for my school trustee candidate factsheet, I took out a piece of lined paper and wrote down my best guess as to how each candidate would do. I ranked each of them based on where I thought they would end up in the count, except for the school trustees, where I just listed who I thought would win.

Out of the 103 predictions I made, only 49 of them were right. That’s a failing grade of 47.6 percent.

I got everything wrong in Wards 9, 12, and 15. All but one wrong in Wards 4, 7, and 11. Over half of Wards 2, 3, 8, and 10 wrong. Half of the trustees wrong. Almost half the mayoral ballot wrong.

Flashbacks to Grade 9 math all over again. Studying, trying to get it, doing the test, and still bombing.

I did call that voter turnout would be down, but I didn’t expect Hamilton to be one of the only municipalities in Ontario to see turnout decline in this round of elections. Province-wide turnout jumped over three percentage points. In some places, turnout was up dramatically; Toronto’s went from 29 percent in 2022 to nearly 46 percent this time, Milton’s jumped 11 percent, Oakville’s was up by 6 percent, and even Brantford’s went up by a respectable 5 percent. But here, turnout dropped by about 4 percent.

That drop in turnout happened even though the city made it easier to vote. There were a half dozen “ballot on demand” locations, an extra weekend of advance voting, and a weekend of special “community polls” in high rise buildings across the city. For the first time, voters could cast ballots at any polling station in their ward, instead of being confined to one geographic area.

Sure, council rejected a plan to offer online voting, there was ample confusion over the absence of “voter cards”, and there were limited alternative methods to cast ballots, but a lot was done to make the process of casting a ballot more convenient.

I have yet to read or hear a cogent analysis of the election. Such is the state of the local media that all Hamiltonians have received in the way of a post-election reflection has come from right-wingers, gloating and claiming the results prove that their own odd view of the city was, in fact, reality.

The Spec’s Scott Radley hailed the result as a victory for thrifty taxpayers everywhere. “After a four-year spendapalooza, [Hamiltonians have] elected a mayor and council that they expect will put the brakes on runaway tax increases,” he wrote.¹

John Best of the Bay Observer took a similar approach, proclaiming the dawn of a new era with “the majority of councillors now committed to fiscal responsibility”, which will, in his eyes, hopefully signal and end to (in his words) the “war on the car”, the “war on landlords”, “guaranteed spending on environmental gadgets”, and “Hamilton taxpayers…servicing homeless people from all across the region because other communities are happy to let us.”

If I may pause to just express some general frustration for a second:

In the minds of a bafflingly large segment of this city, there exists a world where Hamilton had some kind of far-left radical city council that may as well have been spending money on gender affirming surgeries for cyclists, expropriating properties to establish co-ops for polycules, and forcing landlords to wash the feet of people experiencing homelessness. The record increases to the police budget, the growing (and worsening) infrastructure deficit, and investments in cleaning up the messes of previous councils are conveniently ignored while benign policies - some imagined, some exaggerated - are cited as the reason property taxes have increased.

I struggle to square the reality of what I’ve seen in budget discussions with the world Hamilton’s right-wing commentator class believe exists. To these talking heads, the $2.5 million allocated to the Climate Change Action Plan - 0.8 percent of the capital finance plan’s total for “corporate initiatives” - is the reason taxes went up and not, for example, the $40 million the City’s just eating in providing development charge exemptions for developers. Ignore the $40 million tax break for developers but scream endlessly about the $2.5 million dollar investment in things like electric cars and green infrastructure upgrades that will save taxpayers money in the long run.

Make it make sense.

But are Radley and Best right? Did Hamiltonians vote with their pocket books? Did years of right-wing messaging around civic affairs influence the scant 1/3 of the electorate that bothered to cast a ballot? Do they have a strong grasp on the mood of the electorate?

Let’s take a look at the results and see if we can discern anything from the geography, the campaign, and the outcome.

Mapping the mayoral election

As I noted earlier, this election marked a first for Hamilton. This time, eligible voters could cast ballots at any polling station in their ward.

Because of this year’s switch to “vote anywhere” polls, we get an electoral map that’s very different than anything Hamiltonians are used to (unless they saw the map I put together for the Ward 8 by-election).

Instead of tight little geographic boxes bound by natural features and roadways, this map is made up of “Thiessen Polygons” or “Voronoi Cells”. As I wrote when describing the map I made of the Ward 8 results, these indicate “the ‘area of influence’ around a point. In this case, the ‘point’ is a polling station, and the ‘area of influence’ is the likely zone in which the residents who cast ballots at that polling station lived.”

Hamilton’s natural and human-made geography impacts our day-to-day lives. Based on this, I made some adjustments to the polygons. Major highways like the 403 and the Linc create significant barriers which divide our communities in a very real sense (carved into the landscape) and in a more internalized sense (wanting to stay on “your” side of the hard edge in your community). It is more likely that voters opted to cast ballots at polling stations close to where they live and that were within easy walking or short driving distance. Someone in Templemead probably wasn’t going all the way to Huntington Park to vote when there were polling stations closer and on their side of the Linc, for example.

On this map, I also carved out Hamilton’s three post-secondary institutions - McMaster, Mohawk, and Redeemer - as they had “ballot on demand” options for students, which I believe should be represented as their own polls.

So this is the map we get:

Keen observers will note that this map is a near mirror image of the poll-by-poll map from the 2022 election.

In that vote, Horwath won the lower city, neighbourhoods on the mountain north of the Linc, and select pockets in Dundas, Stoney Creek, and Waterdown.

This time, it was practically flipped for the mayor-elect.

Loomis retained a strong base of support in Dundas, as well as pockets in Stoney Creek, Glanbrook, the east Mountain, and Ancaster. Everywhere else, he won areas that previously went to Horwath.

Rob Cooper, on the other hand, peeled away Loomis’s suburban support, taking large polls on the outskirts of the city and on the south mountain. Notably, Cooper also won or tied some of the poorest polls in the city in the Parkview, Red Hill, and Riverdale neighbourhoods, continuing the conservative trend of winning over some of the most economically disadvantaged people in the community. While Cooper’s campaign was, in many ways, a slightly more energetic version of the Bratina campaign from 2022 (which was also backed by a nascent form of the Muys/Kuruc Network - the only group that could really claim victory on election night), he was able to add around 30,000 votes to the total earned by the former mayor, allowing him to come in second.

Horwath’s support cratered, plummeting from 59,216 in 2022 to just over 20,000 votes this time around. That’s a drop of nearly two-thirds.

While a good portion of those who abandoned Horwath likely went to Loomis and a hefty chunk went to Scarlett Gillespie’s fourth-place campaign, a sizable number probably also defected to Cooper. Of note are the polls in Stoney Creek that flipped from Horwath in 2022 to Cooper in 2026.

Indeed, I’d wager that Cooper was able to draw support from Loomis by running a more right-wing campaign in the suburbs and take Horwath support in Stoney Creek thanks to a mix of anti-establishment frustration and the growing strength of the Muys/Kuruc Network.

On the other hand, Loomis was able to peel off soft Horwath supporters who were dissatisfied with the mayor’s performance but weren’t sold on Cooper’s hard-right message. Loomis kept his supporters but was also able to win over skittish progressives who realized the Horwath campaign wasn’t going anywhere and wanted more than anything to stop Cooper. All of that was reflected in the fact that Horwath didn’t win a single election day or advance poll, only performing well in small institutional polls like retirement homes and care facilities.

On that point: the map I’ve provided is slightly misleading. And that’s because, as the old political geography adage goes, “land doesn’t vote”.

We political geographers don’t have many adages (or job prospects) so give me this, at least.

Taking a look at the Thiessen Polygon map, you see some deep, deep blue-grey pockets (representing those polls won by Cooper, as well as some strong support across the suburban belt for the short-served Ward 8 councillor.

But when we break it down by the size of the vote earned, the scale of Loomis’s victory comes into clearer focus. Cooper decisively won polls with few voters and lots of land, while Loomis swept the polls with high populations and small areas. So if we represent the results proportionally based on the number of votes earned by the winner in each poll, we get a different map:

Loomis collected a massive number of advance votes and was able to target the areas in each ward where people really participated. Kirkendall, old Ancaster, the northeast mountain, and the communities along Twenty Road in Ward 11 helped him tremendously in this election. I think it’s important to note here that these are areas he also won in 2022, showing his campaign recognized where he had a base of support and worked diligently to mobilize those voters.

Contrast that with Horwath’s campaign. In 2022, her best polls were in the Landsdale neighbourhood of Ward 3. This time around, the polls at Cathedral High School and the Eva Rothwell Centre (covering the Landsdale neighbourhood) were won by Loomis. The poll at Cathedral saw Horwath come in third with just 19.6 percent of the vote behind Loomis (who got 29 percent there) and Gillespie, who was able to secure around a quarter of the votes cast at that station. At the Eva Rothwell Centre, Horwath was just 7 votes ahead of Gillespie, but still behind Loomis and Cooper who earned 32.7 percent and 20 percent respectively.

Simply put, Loomis ran a very strong campaign. He had help from seasoned politicos and put in the work to create a broad coalition that drew support from across the political spectrum and across the city. He was able to win polls in every ward except Ward 9 (and, even there, he nearly won the poll at St. Paul Elementary School, coming in just three votes behind Cooper) and tie together disparate parts of the city.

The challenge now will be to govern the same way.

Election night blues

I was at City Hall on election night. And the scene there was…well, the only word that can describe it is “bizarre”.

On the main floor, the building’s dull backrooms were abuzz with city officials processing advance, on-demand, institutional, and community poll ballots, as well as verifying the results from the city’s regular polling stations and fielding calls from journalists frustrated they weren’t getting results quickly enough.

On the second floor, the “watch party” in council chambers had the vibes of an emergency shelter for victims of a natural disaster. Fewer than a dozen spectators wandered aimlessly around horseshoe, looking bored and out-of-place as a legion of stern security guards monitored the meagre crew.

Truck after truck of results came rolling in, each new delivery setting off a flurry of activity on the main floor, almost entirely unnoticed by the people waiting for results one floor above. Reams of vote tabulation machine receipt paper coated the walls near the business service centre in City Hall’s east wing, allowing journalists and scrutineers a chance to verify the tabulation and send numbers along to their readers or campaign offices.

The three or four candidates who bothered to show up at City Hall wandered in, checked out the count, and then quickly left - all except mayoral candidate Pamela Mitchell, who spent the evening chatting with elections workers as they tabulated results. As she was leaving, she kept saying how “disappointed” she was that she “didn’t do better” in Ancaster (Mitchell came in last there, winning 25 votes in Ward 12 for a total of 0.2 percent of the vote).

The final count wasn’t done until after midnight. I lay awake in bed that night, tossing and turning until 3:30 AM, processing everything that happened. I still don’t think things have fully sunk in.

What I can say is that we now have one of the most right-wing councils and public school boards in a generation.

Five committed social conservatives backed by the Christian Nationalist group Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) won - two councillors and three trustees (another trustee was “half” endorsed by the group and has expressed socially-conservative views online). One of the CLC-backed councillors “equated abortion with murder in correspondence with CLC staff,” according to the group. The other went “viral” in conservative Christian circles for an impassioned speech she gave at a 2024 Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board meeting in which she implored the Catholic trustees to ban the Pride flag from their schools. One of the trustees promised to remove “biased” and “age-inappropriate” books from schools and oppose the “woke” agenda. Another gave “perfect answers” to the CLC survey they sent to candidates, probing them on their feelings towards women’s rights.

The CLC’s Director of Political Operations even highlighted how happy they were with the results in Hamilton, noting Cooper’s “spectacular run” for mayor and calling out their victories in the council and trustee races here. “Our goal for 2030 is to have the same kind of victories in city halls…and to boast of securing pro-life, pro-family majority councils,” he wrote, before ending with the prayer, “we give thanks to almighty God for His blessing upon these candidates and upon CLC’s efforts to elect Godly men and women to public office. With child-like confidence in our loving Father, we will ask Him to increase His favour upon is in the next election,” concluding with a call for donations.

Across the board, we have a deeply right-wing council. That’s why I noted that one of the best organized groups in the city - the Conservative Party’s local apparatus I call the “Muys/Kuruc Network” - was one of the big winners of the night. Just before the election, an executive with the union-turned-developer LiUNA (a person who endorsed Cooper and has strong ties to the Muys/Kuruc Network), posted their “endorsed” council slate. Among those backed by this high-profile executive, five won their seats.

By my back-of-the-napkin math, the right wing block on council now has around eight reliable votes out of sixteen. Another three lean slightly to the right, giving them a veto-proof majority of 68.75 percent of council if they can wrangle everyone together.

On the HWDSB side, the progressive block still has around seven votes. But the four right-wing social conservatives on the board will have a massive platform and, given the steady reduction in the power of trustees, they will have little more to do than just use that megaphone to spread their ideas.

What now?

So, back to the original question: what was the mood of the electorate?

That’s something I’m still struggling with.

On the mayoral front, it was clear the status quo wasn’t cutting it. Andrea Horwath was overwhelmingly rejected by the city’s voters who were deeply unhappy with her performance. But there’s nothing definitive in those results at all.

Loomis won polls Horwath previously carried, but so did Cooper. In some of the most marginalized polls in the Stipley and Crown Point neighbourhoods, Horwath placed a distant third behind Loomis, Cooper, and Gillespie in that order. Even in the ward where Horwath did best - her home base of Ward 1 - she only managed to earn 21.5 percent of the vote.

Cooper carried some of the more traditionally conservative wards of the city - wards that also elected very conservative councillors this time around - but his victories were far from overwhelming. Cooper was only 234 votes (of 10,571 cast) ahead of Loomis in Ward 10 and only 466 ahead of Loomis in Ward 15 (where 8,446 were cast).

Gillespie absolutely had an impact in Wards 1, 2, and 3. In the latter, she placed third, just 14 votes behind Horwath in the total count. But the wide vote splits in each of those wards meant voters were deeply, deeply divided.

Indeed, I think that’s the best way to summarize the mayoral election. While Radley and Best and the other conservative commentators in town have hailed the results as a triumphant return to common sense and low taxes, I think that really misses the mark.

There was deep, palpable anger felt by many, but they had few compelling channels for that anger. Some went for the left populism of Gillespie. Some went for the right populism of Cooper. Some went for the moderate urbanism of Loomis. Some stuck with the reliable centrism of Horwath.

At a macro-level, the people of Hamilton appear divided - not just by geography, but at a neighbourhood level. Voters in the some polls were split almost evenly in four directions.

I keep coming back to the poll at Cathedral High School in Ward 3.

Loomis earned 29 percent, Gillespie got 25 percent, Horwath took 20 percent, and Cooper rounded things out with 18 percent. Just 114 votes separated first place Loomis with fourth place Cooper.

There, in the heart of the city, four candidates with four dramatically different visions for the city split the vote in a confounding way. This, in a ward where voter turnout dropped to just 25 percent (lowest in the city).

How do we even begin to understand what this means?

The 2026 election was one defined by absolute confusion on the part of voters. Voters kicked out councillors in the centre and on the right and replaced them with a collection of centre-right and hard-right wingers that absolutely will pick through the municipal budget with a fine tooth comb.

An earlier version of this edition was entitled “Hamilton Goes Right” given we now have the most right-wing city council and Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board of trustees in a generation.

But that label didn’t sit well with me because it implies motive. And I don’t think the voters of Hamilton had that motive.

They were angry, they wanted change, but, most of all, they had little idea as to whom among the people presenting themselves to the electorate was the most qualified to provide that change.

In Ward 15, voters threw out a long-time local leader who earned a reputation as a right-leaning moderate on council and replaced him with a hard-right social conservative. In Ward 9, voters acted similarly, electing a young protégé of the Muys/Kuruc Network. The vacant Ward 10 seat was narrowly won by another social conservative who ran in a field populated with right-wing candidates. Ward 12 replaced their moderate with a right-winger and Ward 4 traded their moderate for an ideologically ambiguous figure who has tried his hand at different political styles across town.

But then there’s Ward 7, where one of the city’s most recognizable social conservatives was replaced by a political unknown. The right wing candidates failed to break through in Wards 2 and 3, but the left wing candidate narrowly lost in Ward 1. In Ward 13, the centre-right moderate beat both candidates from the right and left. In Ward 11, the Muys/Kuruc Network-backed candidate barely even campaigned. In Ward 14, the right-left match up swung decidedly for the right, while the battle for Ward 8 was won handily by the Liberal Party-affiliated moderate.

Because of all this, it is almost impossible to do a macro-level analysis of the results on the council side.

It’s equally hard to understand what happened with the trustee races. A well-funded and visible right-wing candidate came in third behind a former student trustee and a ghost candidate in Ward 1 while a moderate incumbent trustee in Wards 11 and 12 lost to a CLC-endorsed social conservative.

Even on the Catholic board, things were hard to understand, with one of the city’s longest serving elected officials being defeated in a rematch in Ward 10 and the respected trustee for Wards 12 and 13 falling to another ghost candidate. The only fun fact of the whole night is that the Catholic board is now 55.6 percent Valvasori’s and Agostino’s.

If you’re looking for answers as to why we had the election we just had, you won’t get them from me.

Instead, all I can provide is this: Hamilton’s progressive left had a terrible night.

So now is the time to organize.

Not in a couple of years.

Not just before an election.

Right now.

No more holding grudges about lost nomination meetings or split resolution votes at conventions or imagined slights. No more egos. No more figureheads. No more veneration of elected leaders, past and present. No more writing off sections of the city as “unwinnable”. No more dogma and outdated tactics and self-aggrandizement. No more ignoring our history. No more giving up our future.

It’s time to organize. If this election teaches us one thing, it’s that the voters of Hamilton are hungry for compelling, coherent, and competent leaders and will not tolerate the politics of old. These results show us that there is literally nothing but possibility in front of us.

The sweeping victory of the social conservatives and the Muys/Kuruc Network wasn’t because they energized the electorate and gave people hope. They rested on the same old tired line opposition leaders always lean on: things are broken and the people in charge are awful. And that appealed to the few people who still bothered to vote. The right was organized, focused, and knew that, at the end of the day, they can always rely on people closest to their ideological position to vote reliably.

Voter turnout dropped because people who weren’t swayed by the doom-and-gloom vision of the world and the oh-so inspiring message of “fiscal responsibility” coming from centre-right and right-wing candidates simply didn’t have a strong enough camp around which to rally. Too many competing and under-resourced candidates, too many egos, and too much focus on micro-level stuff and not enough of what we needed to provide.

People wanted change, and we failed to meet the moment.

But let’s be clear: with the right organization, the right training, and the right candidates, anything is possible. Hamilton’s right-wing proved that this time around. But that’s in large part because they didn’t have an organized progressive opposition providing a compelling alternative for voters.

So yeah, this election wasn’t great for progressives. And, let’s face it, the next four years might really, really suck. But we can either keep fighting each other or we can grow up, organize, and get ready for 2030 starting right now.

I’m definitely coming out of my fog now. What’s become clear is that we need to get to work.

So let’s make it happen.

Hamilton’s counting on us.

1  _{Scott Radley. “Hamilton voters show they were serious about wanting big change at city hall” Hamilton Spectator, October 27, 2026 - Spec link (Paywalled).}