1) 2006- Klein quits, leadership battle begins. Frontrunners are an oldboy oilpatch favorite Jim Dinning, Morton as hard right 2nd place, Stelmach as third place rural moderate. The PC leadership process has a couple of quirks in the process, First, anybody in AB can vote on PC leader by buying a $5 memebership. Second, there is preferential voting where not just your fiorst choice but also your second pick can have influence on the winner.
After the first ballot it looks quite likely that Calgary oilpatch fave Dinning will be beaten by calgarysocial dinosaur nightmare Morton. Albertans including many non-PCs take note and join the party in droves and elect non-Calgarian moderate Stelmach as leader and Premier.
Wildrose is really born at this moment, in two ways. Calgary business peope have picked the PC leader for decades, and they don't like having a northern farmer as Premier because they cannot control him. They don't like it at all, and that includes a bunch of oldschool Tory ministers still in office, icluding Morton himself. There is another group of ministers- the church kind- who also hate it that Morton has lost, since he hates women and gays. The evangelicals massed behind Morton, and came really close to backing his bid for power. They brought many people to Wildrose. Wildrose organizes and fundraises, dissent grows between Stelmach and the old guard within the PCs, many of whom have been MLAs and Minsiters for decades.
Calgary has been shut out of power, for the first time in decades of Calgary based Premiers.
2)Fast forward a few years. Stelmach has won a huge majority, but can see the cracks within his own party and the quiet growth and big oil money and church votes in Wildrose. He knows their support within his own party is almost entirely the extreme right. He knows he will have big trouble from Wildrose if he is leader in the next election, due in a year. He knows a chunk of his support is irretrievably gone, so he knows he a) has to resign and
move the Party into the niddle. There are votes to be mined there, because the Liberals are coming apart at the seams. (liberasls got 26% of popular vote in 2008!). When the leadership campaign runs, the hardcore right rump represented by dinosaurs like Morton and Orman do badly, not surprising since the hard right wing has defected to Wildrose. The two remaining are Gary Mar and Alsion Redford, both centrist Red Tories. They are more or less the same candidate, though Mar is much more oldboy than Redford. Significantly, both are from Calgary.
Redford runs a brilliant campaign and comes from behind to win. Rememeber the ease of joining the PC party to vote on leader, it happens again- many outsiders and many Liberals join the PCS and vote for Redord becuase she is not at all unlike them. The Liberal Party is in serious disarray now, haing elected a new leader themselves(Raj Sherman) who is widely perceived as being a fool.
[u]3)Fast forward to April, 2012.[/u] Redford knows that Wildrose has momentum, but she aso knows through quiet polling that it is soft and there are many undecided. She also knowsd that voter turnout was very low last election, and many Tories stayed home secure in the knowledge then that a win was inevitable.
The campaign for the last weeek for the PCs has three themes: get that vote out, get a viral campaign to highlight the homophobia and social conservatism of the Wildrose, and try to get some strategic voting going so that Libs and NDP will shift votes to her. Of the three, the last was by far the least important since many Liberals had already shifted to her in the center, and NDP voters are the elast likely to vote PC under any circumstances. The most importsant is getting out the vote, since she knew Wildrose had already peaked with committed votes, there weren't any more hard right or hard religious to get.
And it worked.
The voter turnout went from 41% in 2008 to 57% in 2012, an huge increase and very unusual in Canada. They came out because they saw the threat of the draconian social conservatism of Widlrose. They mostly voted PC because they are mostly PC, and they knew Redord was a centrist .
The lack of impact of strategic voting was clear with NDP support increasing from 8% in 2008 to 10% in 2012. If there had been any significant startegic voting, it should have dropped.
The Liberals polled a solid 26% in 2008 and a dismal 10% this year. All of that 16% went to Redford, but it did not go on April 23, it went in the previous three years as the party collapsed. The Libs really jumped ship when they helped elect Redford as PC leader, and many more left when they elected the dismal Raj Sherman.
The PCs polled 44%, a drop from 52% in 2008. They actually lost much more than 8%, since the Wildrose gained popular vote dramatically from 7% to 34%, nearly all from the PCs. The PCs replaced almost all of it with centrist votes from the Liberals.
An interesting result is the electoral map of Alberta. Calgary is overwhelmingly PC, with a couple of Wildrose and Liberals. Edmonton is strongly PC, with a some NDP and a coupke Liberals in the mix. Eveything rural in the north is PC. The only place the Wildrose dominated was southern rural Alberta- the Bible Belt.
4) The future, as in 2016: The biggest political challenges in Alberta will be tied to the economy, and the future is not that bright. America, our only customer, is rapidly increasing domestic oil prodcution. We have no other markets. Natural gas is in very sharp decline as North American inventories soar. The rosy pictures painted by everybody will be very hard to achieve in this environment.
But politically:
NDP won't crack their 10% threshold with their current leader, who is as charismatic as a turnip. They might do a little bit better with Rachel Notley.
The Liberals are deceased for the foreseeable future, they have conceded the center to the PC and have nowhere to go and nobody to lead them there anyway.
The Wildrose have maxed out their vote now, and have to move to the center socially to expand that. Danielle Smith is well capable of playing that chameleon, but it will not sell well with her power base. Not well at all.
PCs as noted have a perfect base now, with all others isolated and on the far right and left, but face really serious money problems ahead. Howe they handle that will determine their future.
