Biggest question in the Ontario Liberal race: Who has best shot at beating Doug Ford?

The 80,000 members of the Ontario Liberal Party will soon choose their new leader, and the fundamental question they'll be facing is which candidate has the best shot at defeating Premier Doug Ford in the next election.

While the Liberals are still smarting over their second straight election disaster — winning just eight seats in 2022 after clinging on to just seven in 2018 — they are seeing a few signs of hope. 

Their party won two summer byelections, including an Ottawa-area riding that hadn't gone Liberal for about 100 years. They out-fundraised the other parties during the July-September period. And they're buoyed by recent polling that suggests Ford and his PCs are bleeding support over the Greenbelt controversy.

It's all got Liberals sensing opportunity, and it's raising the stakes in the leadership campaign.          

Dan Moulton, a veteran Liberal strategist who is neutral in the leadership race, says "winnability" is really the bottom line when it comes to choosing who should head the party. 

"Liberals are hungry for a winner," said Moulton, a partner with the public affairs form Crestview Strategy. "The decision-making framework of (party) members is about who's going to be best positioned to beat Doug Ford in the next provincial election. It's how they're going to make their choice."

The four candidates vying for the leadership are Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie, Toronto MP Nate Erskine-Smith, Kingston MPP Ted Hsu and Ottawa MP Yasir Naqvi. (A fifth candidate, Toronto MPP Adil Shamji withdrew last month and endorsed Crombie. )

With less than six weeks to go before the leadership vote, the four are travelling the province trying to woo party members — and "winnability" forms a big part of their pitches. 

Crombie says people across the province know who she is, and not just those who are Liberal partisans. "I think I brought a spark into this race," she said.

"I think it's very, very important to (party members) that they pick someone who rankles Doug Ford, and they can feel comfortable putting up against Doug Ford, who has a track record of going up against Doug Ford and can win," said Crombie in an interview.

When Liberal campaigners were knocking on doors in the 2022 election campaign, Crombie says they found then-leader Steven Del Duca suffered from a lack of name recognition.

"People didn't know who he was," she said. "Name recognition matters. You're better off if you're not explaining at the door who the leader is." 

Crombie's rivals for the leadership have their own pitches on what makes for a leader who can win the next campaign. 

Naqvi, who served in three different cabinet posts in Kathleen Wynne's Liberal government before moving to federal politics, agrees that electability is important and says it goes well beyond name recognition.