Here's a topic political analysts will be wrestling over for years to come: Were Vancouver voters influenced by the week-long uproar over the news about the city's approval of a potential $100-million loan to the builders of the Olympic village.

You might think it's all too boring for words to analyze, but it matters to you, you innocent consumers of media who also happen to vote.

That's because, if people think that the loan issue mattered, there will be even more scrambling in future elections to publicize scandals and misdeeds of opponents in order to sway voters. Just wait until next May. If it didn't really matter, perhaps there will be some dampening of the appetite for that kind of campaign strategy.

I find myself perplexed on the issue, because Simon Fraser University political scientist Kennedy Stewart conducted an exit poll on Saturday that indicated that half of the people who voted said it influenced their vote. Of that half, 70 per cent were more inclined to vote for Vision Vancouver and Gregor Robertson as a result.

But strategists from both campaigns tell me that their polling showed them that the loan controversy had little or no effect.

At the NPA camp, I was told that there was a 20-point spread in popularity between Gregor Robertson and Peter Ladner that showed little change throughout the campaign.

"We didn't lay a glove on Robertson. From the start, he was incredibly popular. He had no negatives at all." Peter Ladner showed a bit of a rise in mid-September, showing a popularity far in excess of his party's. Then that dropped back down again to the level of the NPA's popularity within short order.

Robertson's SkyTrain fine was the first chink in his armour, but the negative reaction to that faded within a couple of days.

The NPA campaign was in trouble long before the loan story came along.

"That was the last nail in the coffin. We were already sunk by then. The wheels were already coming off the Titanic," said my philosophical friend with a wonderful command of metaphors.

Over at Vision, an equally philosophical type said the same to me. The polling there showed the closest Peter ever got to Gregor was on Nov. 6 (that was three days after the fare evasion story).

The campaign started with decided voters saying they favoured Gregor (64 per cent to 30 per cent for Ladner), then Gregor went down to 55 per cent while Peter rose to 42 per cent on Nov. 6, then Gregor bounded back up to 60 per cent by Nov. 12.

The news of the loan, which broke Nov. 6, seemed to give a bump to Gregor, raising his numbers and lowering Peter's. But ironically, it worked the other way for the councillors.

The percentage of people saying they would vote for Vision councillors dropped in the few days right after the loan story broke, while the percentage for the NPA councillors rose. Again, both of those levelled back out to previous numbers after a few days.

So maybe people tell exit pollers that it made a difference because they want to believe it did? Or maybe the polls of decided voters is so broad that it didn't hone in on that small percentage of people (30 per cent) who actually went out to vote, therefore we didn't see how strongly the loan affected those who did actually vote?

One other thing to remember is that the central issue of homelessness and city well-being is something that both Stewart's exit poll (which you can read a brief story about in the Vancouver Sun) and the Vision polling showed was actually the deciding factor long before election day.

Homelessness, affordable housing and a feeling that the city was not doing well -- those were the dominant issues in everyone's minds and it's what actually helped cement people's attitudes about who they would vote for weeks before the loan story ever broke.

And, on all those issues, the majority of people chose Vision as the party to tackle them.

With a report by CTV British Columbia's Frances Bula