"Wynne has already spoken of the “stark” contrast between her brand and his. But Ford, quite smartly spoke respectfully of her Sunday as a good campaigner and debater, pointedly adding she hadn’t yet debated him. " ---

Christine Elliott won the popular vote 52 to 48 per cent over Doug Ford in the third round of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario leadership race. She also won 64 ridings to his 60 on the last ballot. But because all ridings had 100 points divided by vote share on the weighted preferential ballot, Ford edged out Elliott by 50.6 to 49.4 per cent.

The margin couldn’t have been thinner — Ford won by 153 points: 6,202 points to 6,049. Had Elliott received just 77 more points, she would have won.

But it wasn’t because of voting irregularities, such as members voting under wrong postal codes, that Elliott lost. She lost because not enough of Caroline Mulroney’s supporters moved to her on the last ballot. After Mulroney was eliminated with 18 per cent of the points on the second ballot, 75 per cent of her supporters moved to Elliott on the third ballot.

Many of her remaining supporters simply abstained.

Consider — while the PCPO website says 63,545 party members voted on the second round, only 62,243 expressed a preference between Ford and Elliott on the third ballot. That means 1,203 PC members abstained. And virtually all of them were clearly supporters of Caroline.

(By way of disclosure, and to state the obvious, I’ve known Caroline Mulroney her entire life. And Christine Elliott’s late husband, Jim Flaherty, was my oldest friend from high school days, and I spent many evenings at their home in Whitby, a splendidly restored 19th century stone farmhouse where they raised their triplet sons.)

It should also be noted that Tanya Granic Allen won a surprisingly strong 15 per cent, or 1,882 points on the first ballot.

While she started out as a one-issue candidate, the sex-ed lady, she exceeded expectations in the two debates, and also showed she had a strong retail game. Fully 83 per cent of her votes went to Ford on the second ballot, according to CBC polling analyst Eric Grenier, which proved to be the margin of his victory.

The weighted ballot is a legacy of the merger between the federal Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance in 2003. Peter MacKay, then leader of the PCs, insisted that all ridings be created equal going into the 2004 leadership campaign won by Stephen Harper. For MacKay and the PCs, this was a deal-breaker in the merger, and Harper understood that mainstream Conservatives didn’t want to be swamped by the former Reform crowd from western Canada.

Pre-marked preferential ballots may not be a problem at political conventions, but they’ve taken a lot of enjoyment out of them. Delegated conventions were a lot more suspenseful, and a lot more fun.

The ranked pre-voting wasn’t the issue at Saturday’s Conservative meeting, which for hours begged the question of how the PCs could run an $800 billion economy if they couldn’t manage a vote announcement. It went on for four hours before a party official announced they had lost the hall in Markham, asked supporters to leave the room, and was roundly booed for his trouble. (For four long hours, CBC’s Rosemary Barton and TVO’s Steve Paikin called the equivalent of a rain delay in baseball in terms for which Montreal Expos announcer Dave Van Horne was famous.)

The Conservatives limited the damage from Saturday’s chaotic event by announcing Ford as the winner by evening’s end, rather than making it an overnight disaster, and closed the case when Elliott sensibly accepted the result and rallied to Ford’s side on Sunday evening.

And while the Ontario PCs didn’t get a convention bounce out of the Saturday shambles, it doesn’t appear to have hurt them, either. An overnight poll by Forum Research in Monday’s Toronto Star put the PCs at 44 per cent, the NDP at 27 per cent and the Liberals at 23 per cent. That’s majority territory, big-time, for the blue team.

Indeed, in spite of the chaos engulfing the Ontario Conservatives since Patrick Brown’s resignation six weeks ago, their polling numbers looking to the June 7 general election haven’t gone south at all since then.

Which tells us two things. This is a change election, after 15 years of Liberal rule. More than that, it may well be a throw-the-bums-out election. You can change the narrative of the first ballot question but not the second, as we saw with the federal Liberals in 2006, the Alberta Conservatives and federal Conservatives in 2015.

Even worse for the Ontario Liberals, Premier Kathleen Wynne’s approval ratings are in the low 20s, and you don’t win elections from there. But the Liberals will take some comfort from Ford’s 48 per cent disapproval rating in the Forum poll, with only 36 per cent approving of the new PC leader.

Clearly many mainstream Ontario voters are concerned about Ford’s right wing populism. The Liberals will try to portray him as “Trump North”, though he is obviously nothing of the sort on issues such as immigration. Wynne has already spoken of the “stark” contrast between her brand and his. But Ford, quite smartly spoke respectfully of her Sunday as a good campaigner and debater, pointedly adding she hadn’t yet debated him. Not a bad point. In the second Conservative leadership debate, he proved he could deliver a punch against Elliott, which might have been the defining moment of the campaign. He also showed that night in Ottawa that he works a room very well.

Moreover, winning 60 ridings in the leadership race, he clearly grew his campaign from suburban 905 in Toronto to southern, northern and rural eastern Ontario.

The Liberals have already put some interesting policies in the window — free meds for people under 25, the $15-an-hour minimum wage, and free tuition for university students from poor families. There are some very smart people in the Liberal war room, starting with pollster David Herle.

But this is a different campaign than the one the Liberals were looking at when they assumed Elliott would be their opponent. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.

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