When SooToday spoke with Ross Romano late last night after 19 consecutive campaign hours, he was still talking about going out at midnight to pick up campaign signs.
Rosario (Ross) Romano’s election day began at 4:10 a.m. with his morning embarrassment.
When Romano is in what he thinks could be a close race, he pulls out all the stops.
Just three hours earlier, he had been with his mother, Lina, in the Bayview neighborhood, hanging cards on the doorknobs until 1 a.m.
“As a progressive conservative, you often have to work twice as hard to get half as much,” he told SooToday after a similar 11-hour campaign sprint during the 2018 provincial elections.
Yesterday, Romano and his exit team visited an unprecedented 5,000 doors on Thursday before announcing his departure just 30 minutes before polls closed.
“We finished at Parkview Court. I decided to take the pin out at 8:30 pm at the point. I finished the street. I think it was the third time I was there today.”
“We never had numbers like today … We started on Day 1 with 800. By Day 2 it was 1200. Until today, at 10 or 12, we have surpassed 2000.”
All this work paid off.
Romano was re-elected Sault MP with 12,606 votes, 2,577 more than his closest opponent, the new Democrat Michelle McCleeve-Kennedy.
Provincially, his Ontario PC party, led by Doug Ford, won another government by a majority.
Liberal leader Stephen Del Duca and NDP leader Andrea Horvat have announced they will resign as leaders of their respective parties.
By the time SooToday interviewed Romano at his Quattro victory party around 11 p.m., he was visibly shivering with pain in his legs.
“My best knocker on the door is still my mother. I kept trying to tell her, “Four years, Mom, since the last one. We don’t have to hit so hard this time. I don’t know if he does. I think she hit more doors in this campaign than in the last one. “
Ross told us that the four years after the 2018 election made a significant difference in his ability to physically endure all this hitting the sidewalk.
“I notice my body – the difference of 38 years compared to 42 years really hurts me. Going down the stairs in the morning is infinitely harder than it used to be. ”
It was an election with two pairs of shoes for Romano.
His toe pierced the upper left shoe of his first pair only in the second week of the campaign.
In addition to all this knocking on doors, Romano also had campaign teams working with telephones and a sign team whose work ethic angered some environmentally conscious voters.
“I think the signs are an important part of the election,” he said.
“But it’s also very important to get rid of them because people don’t want to see them again after the election is over, probably even before it’s over. It’s important to get rid of them quickly.”
So important that at 11 pm last night, Romano was getting ready to go out at midnight to start work on cleaning the signs.
During the campaign, Romano spoke out against the disinformation spread by the provincial staff of the NDP campaign, falsely hinting that he did not live in Sault Ste. Marie.
Last night, he reiterated his conviction that the local elections in 2022 “have reached a level that is inappropriate for the way I would have participated in the campaign.”
“I think it’s important to play your own game, not to get to a certain level.”
“We were able to campaign, keeping our core values intact while maintaining our integrity.”
“Today we had 70 volunteers running to people’s homes to withdraw the vote,” said McCleeve-Kennedy, the local NDP candidate.
The New Democrats deployed a group of about 30 young people who distributed flyers and campaigned on her behalf on a daily basis.
McCleeve-Kennedy also had help from local unions.
“It wasn’t the result we wanted, but we had an amazing campaign.”
Candidates rejected by McCleeve and Romano included the most crowded New Blue candidate Shane Pankhurst (3.3%) and Liam Liam Hancock, who somehow managed to garner six percent of the vote without significantly escaping his campaign. they even answer calls from media organizations.
Also running was Naomi Sayers, who received four percent of the vote as an independent candidate; and Keegan Gilfillan of the Green Party, who received 2.5 percent.
Sault Ste. Marie was 44.11 percent, according to Elections Ontario.
Michael Manta was re-elected to Algoma-Manitulin with 46% of the vote, compared to 35.4% for progressive conservative Cheryl Fort.
– with files from Darren Taylor, James Hopkin, Ken Armstrong and Canadian Press
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