In the previous post about the municipal elections in Toronto I concluded that Joe Mihevc's support in his successful campaign to be re-elected as councillor for Ward 21 was not affected by his involvement in the St. Clair streetcar right-of-way controversy. Instead it seemed that he was getting his support from the less affluent parts of the ward (many of which were most affected by the right-of-way), while his chief opponent, Shimmy Posen, was getting his from the more affluent areas.
There has been some talk about the results of the mayoral race reflecting increased disparities in income, so I thought I'd look at how income was related to the mayoral vote in Ward 21. My hypothesis was that Rob Ford, the successful candidate for mayor, would have won most of the subdivisions Mr. Posen did, and few of the subdivisions Mr. Mihevc won.
Mr. Ford did win a significantly* larger proportion of the mayoral vote in subdivisions won by Mr. Posen than in subdivisions won by Mr. Mihevc -- 44% in Mr. Posen's subdivisions and 29% in Mr. Mihevc's. However, in the subdivisions won by Mr. Posen, Mr Ford was outpolled by another candidate, George Smitherman. Mr. Ford received 1,844 votes in those subdivisions, while Mr. Smitherman received 1,942.
Obviously Mr. Ford appealed to affluent voters more than he did to less affluent voters. However, the results in Ward 21 suggest his victory was not chiefly due to a main effect of income. Income probably had its effect in combination with some other variable.
* I didn't use the raw vote counts for the statistical test, since almost any difference would have been significant. Instead I used a median test comparing the percentages of te vote Mr. Ford won in each subdivision (p < .01).
Actual Analysis
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