With just under two weeks to go until election day, Calgarians are still unsure about who to vote for with multiple candidates up for consideration.
According to new polling from Janet Brown Opinion Research, 34 per cent of Calgarians count themselves as undecided.
Brown’s poll shows Jeromy Farkas in the lead with 27 per cent.
Incumbent Jyoti Gondek and Communities First party candidate Sonya Sharp are tied at 23 per cent support, followed by Jeff Davison with 16 per cent and The Calgary Party mayoral candidate Brian Thiessen with eight per cent.
“This election is anybody’s game and it’s too close to call,” Brown told Global News on Friday.
Just 6.1 per cent of eligible voters, unofficially 54,626 people in Calgary, cast a ballot in advance voting between Monday and Thursday.
Despite the low turnout so far, there is buzz around the race.
“I think it’s going to be a really tight race and I’m curious to see how it turns out,” said Jim Dansereau after voting on Friday.
Get daily National news
Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.
“I don’t think there’s a clear favourite,” Jim McKee told Global News outside an advance polling station in the Beltline.
“Although, name recognition seems to be holding up over policy.”
According to McKee, it took “a while” to come to a decision over who he was voting for in the narrowing mayor’s race.
“Weighing the possibility of who I want to vote for and winning, and casting a strategic ballot,” he said.
Brown’s research also looked into the potential shift in support between the top contenders in the mayoral race.
“We didn’t just ask who they’re going to vote for, we asked who they’re considering,” Brown said. “And a lot of Calgarians have more than one candidate on their consideration list, even this late into the process.”
Brown crunched the numbers and created a Venn diagram to show the crossover of support between candidates vying to be Calgary’s next mayor.
The amount of overlap is an indicator of how much potential vote shifting there could be in the final days of the campaign, according to Brown, with Farkas sharing the most support between his opponents.
“He has both the most to gain and lose if there’s vote shifting at this point in the campaign,” Brown said.
In comparison to Edmonton’s mayoral race, where Brown’s poll shows there are 46 per cent of voters still undecided, support for each candidate is more concrete than it is in Calgary.
“The people who’ve made up their mind, it’s more firm,” Brown said. “They seem to be less interested in considering other candidates.”
It marks a crucial final stretch in the race for campaigns to shore up support and voters to come to a decision.
Advance polling closes on Oct. 11 at 7 p.m. and election day is on Oct. 20.
1,000 residents of the City of Calgary were surveyed through the Trend Research Online Panel between Oct. 1-8, 2025, under the direction of Janet Brown Opinion Research. Quotas were set for age, gender, and city quadrant. Minimal weighting was applied to match Statistics Canada population data. As a non-probability online survey, a margin of error does not apply. However, the margin of error for a comparable probability sample would be +/-3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
