While Rob Ford’s election exposed a deep divide in the way Torontonians vote, the embattled mayor may be overestimating the ability of his Ford Nation to get him re-elected.

“We have seen public attitudes about scandal change over the past 10-15 years, and we have seen a number of candidates who have been involved with a number of person foillibles pick themselves up and manage to get back in the game,” said Dennis Pilon, a York University political science professor.

Pilon says a lot of public perception around scandal depends on what the scandal is about, and how the candidate deals with the scandal.

“If it’s not clear that the politician is contrite, or they have a plan for dealing with their problem, then I think the public is willing to be an enabler,” Pilon said. “And there I think Rob Ford has not handled this as well as some other politicians.”

But Ford has always been a less-than politically correct character. He was frequently in the news as a bumbling mayoral candidate, making controversial statements and finally winning in an election that saw a giant split in the way Toronto’s downtown and inner suburbs voted.

Observers at the time said that Ford’s election victory showed how divided Toronto was. Several towns around the downtown core were amalgamated in 1998 to form the modern day City of Toronto.

However, the new amalgamated city does not seem to think as one. Here’s a map that shows how Toronto voted for Rob Ford in the last election. The boundaries of the former cities that made up the Toronto area are shown, and the darker the shade, the stronger the support Ford had in that area:

It’s clear that Ford received most of his support from the inner suburbs, while the downtown or ‘Old Toronto’ seemed to be opposed to him.

Pilon says that demographics in the inner suburbs may hold some clues as to why they voted differently from the downtown core.

“What we might be seeing in the suburbs is an older group of more entrenched citizens who feel very threatened by the rate of change in their communities,” Pilon said.

“So they’re seeing wave upon wave of immigrants moving into their neighbourhood and part of what’s happening with Ford Nation is a reaction to that.”

Pilon thinks that there may not be a significant entrenched divide between the inner suburbs and the downtown, as the elections may suggest. He pointed to the previous mayor, David Miller, who received more widespread support, and said that various factors like voter turnout and specific issues could affect election outcomes.

“We could speculate that things like the garbage strike, that had happened in the year before the election, that made a lot of people angry, and it probably motivated a lot of people to vote who wouldn’t normally vote in a municipal election,” Pilon said.

“Municipal elections, hard to get people’s attention. But hey, there’s garbage rotting at their doorsteps, so they were motivated.”

Pilon said he doubts those same people will be motivated in the next election – and here he draws a line between the “Ford Nation” and other voters who might have supported Ford, but did not necessarily constitute his dedicated Nation.

“It’s very important to distinguish between the Ford Nation supporters, who are a very particular populist demographic, and the kind of run-of-the-mill right-wing supporters,” he said.

Pilon said that while a lot of people voted for him simply because he was the right-wing candidates, and while they may have supported his policies and approved his budget cuts, they may not be as forgiving of his scandals.

“Even if he keeps his Ford Nation behind him, it won’t be enough for him to win,” Pilon said.

It’s a thought echoed by Nelson Wiseman, a political science expert at the University of Toronto. He says that a large part of Ford’s support was probably because he was the only major candidate from the inner suburbs, while the downtown had several candidates from there.

“If only 750,000 people live downtown and two million people live in the suburbs, and only one guy is running from the suburbs, and his house looks more like their own house, a lot of those people will identify with him,” Wiseman said.

He drew comparisons with similar situations in other Canadian cities, like Winnipeg and Ottawa.

“I don’t think the people who live in, say, Kanata vote the same way as people in Bytown,” Wiseman said, talking about suburban and downtown Ottawa.

“People like to focus on Rob Ford as a kind of lightning bolt that attracts all this energy, when I think what we see here is a series of unfortunate events, or fortunate, depending on your point of view, that then ultimately result in him becoming the mayor,” Pilon said.