Ward 1 Councillor Maureen Wilson barely won a third term by 147 votes, after losing 2,716 votes compared to here 2022 total, the largest drop of any incumbent councillor across Hamilton.
It is hard to overstate how unexpected this result is. Wilson, a two-term incumbent, is an experienced organizer with a proven political team. Nathan Savelli was a first-time candidate who entered the race on July 29.
“The tipping point for me was her flip on the data centre moratorium,” Savelli told me in an election interview. Opposition to data centres brought him into the race, but he was not a single-issue candidate. He called for basic good governance and cited the Barton and Tiffany outdoor emergency shelter fiasco as a failure of council oversight. Affordable housing, publicly operated transit, support for businesses during construction projects and basic city services were the other planks of his platform.
Across Hamilton, five (5) of the 12 incumbent councillors seeking re-election were defeated.
Wilson benefited from our first-past-the-post electoral system and a vote split. Wilson secured 41.9 per cent of the vote, Savelli 40.3 per cent, and third-place candidate Mark Powell 15.8 per cent.
A Multitude of Reasons Why Wilson Lost Votes: More Than Just Data Centres
Wilson’s decisions on the data centre moratorium are what pushed Savelli to run. She initially voted in favour of a moratorium, then reversed her vote following closed-session legal advice.
Opposition to data centres, and to AI more broadly, appears to have driven turnout at the McMaster University vote-on-demand poll, there were a significant number of new voter registrations at Westdale’s Cootes Paradise Elementary School on election day.
AI was not the only issue.
Wilson’s vote share dropped be 41.1 per cent compared to the last election. She had 75.0 per cent of the total vote in 2022, and only 41.9 per cent in 2026.
Poll-by-poll results cannot be used to determine the causes: Hamilton lets electors vote at any location within their ward, and about 23.5 per cent of ballots (2,232 of 9,499) were cast at advance polls.
Wilson lost support across the entire ward. The margins between Wilson and Savelli were narrow at every poll.
Repeated road reconstruction on Aberdeen Avenue, which candidates across Hamilton cited as poor project management by the City, may help explain the result at Kanetskare (Ryerson) Recreation Centre, a poll Wilson lost. Encampments and public safety have been a significant topic in Strathcona, another election day poll she lost.
Looking Ahead to 2030
Wilson declared in September 2024 that, if re-elected, she would serve only three terms. She has pledged this will be her last.
Ward 1 is expected to be an open seat in 2030.
Population growth, and regular demographic changes, will mean the Ward 1 of 2030 will differ from that of today. The issues will be different, and there will be many more names on the ballot.
Ward 1 was an open seat in 2014, when then-incumbent Brian McHattie ran for mayor. The winner that year was an initially unknown lawyer, Aidan Johnson. How did Johnson, a small-l liberal, win in a ward that leans much more to the left? He had a strong campaign team that knocked on every door, that identified its voters, and got them to the polls.
In 2018, Ward 1 was again an open seat and Wilson won on the strength of having been active in the community, including as an organizer of a group known as the Useful Knowledge Society.
If Savelli runs again, he’ll be the clear frontrunner beginning with name recognition and campaign experience.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this ward during the coming four years, things are going to be interesting.
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Published: November 4, 2026
Last updated: November 4, 2026
Author: Joey Coleman
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