The number to keep in mind from last week’s Mainstreet Research poll on Alberta politics is 64%.

If you add together the support for Wildrose (33%) and the Tories (31%), that’s what you get – 64%. That’s unassailable, unbeatable.

In the 2001 Alberta election, Ralph Klein and the Tories captured 62% of the popular vote. That earned them 74 of the 83 seats then in the legislature. The Liberals won just seven seats; the NDP just two.

If the Tories and Wildrose can get their acts (and their parties) together soon, they could form a single right-of-centre party that could ensure Alberta’s disastrous NDP electoral experiment is jettisoned at the earliest opportunity (spring 2019).

Of course, there are a lot of factors that might keep the new Wildrose-Tory hybrid from achieving full Klein-like success.

The most obvious is that neither party has a leader who rivals Ralph Klein.

Then there’s the fact that some supporters in each party can’t stand the other. There are urbanite, red Tories who can’t imagine sharing a caucus with rural, SoCon Wildrosers. And vice-versa.

Rather than back a merged Wildrose-Tory party, some supporters of each party might just stay home or even drift over to the Libs or Alberta party.

A merged party might not attract all the right-of-centre support, Mainstreet found in its survey last week of over 3,000 Albertans for Postmedia.

The point is, the surest way to end Alberta’s democratic socialist nightmare ASAP is for the Tories to accept Wildrose Leader Brian Jean’s openness to forming a single party.

Undoubtedly there are people in both parties who don’t want to share, who hold out hope their side can wrestle power away from the NDP on its own. And the NDP are falling fast enough to make that dream a possibility.

Since last May, the NDP have fallen from 41% to 31% last July to 27% last week. Premier Rachel Notley herself has seen her approval rating cut almost in half from 60% after last spring’s campaign to 36% now.

And even those support levels are deceiving. They are skewed heavily by the NDP’s and Notley’s continuing popularity in Edmonton. Governmentown. Publicsectorville.

According to Mainstreet, the NDP still poll 44% in Edmonton. Even though that is a big drop from the well over 50% they polled in the May 5, 2015 election, it is still enough to hold on to all the city’s seats — so long as there are two right-of-centre parties to split the vote.

The NDP have dropped to just 22% support in Calgary and a miniscule 17% in the rest of the province. (Thank the arbitrary, ham-fist farm legislation, Bill 6, for that latter number.)

So the NDP’s 27% support in the recent Mainstreet survey isn’t spread broadly enough to win them many seats outside Welovegovernmentburg.

That’s even more clear from the poll’s results on the popularity of the NDP’s economic plan.

While just a quarter of Edmontonians like the Notley government’s economic policies, that’s way more than the 5% of Albertans in Calgary and the rest of the province.

Still, without a merger on the right, Alberta politics starts to resemble federal politics.

The three major parties all fluctuate up or down around one-third support with the winner of elections being the party lucky enough to have its support surge to around 40% on election day.

Supporters (especially donors) of Wildrose and the Tories need to pressure their leaders and caucuses to merge and merge soon to ensure the two-thirds of Albertans who usually vote for conservative-ish parties have one, broadly free-market choice next time.

That way there will be no chance of a second term for the NDP.