Greg Sorbara, one of the smartest political campaign minds in Ontario, was bang on when he predicted Kathleen Wynne was headed for a devastating defeat in this month’s provincial election.

Sorbara, who served as finance minister, Liberal Party president and campaign chair over a 30-year career in politics, made the prediction in March, 2017, some 15 months before voting day.

“There’s a whole lot of people in the Ontario Liberal party who think that it’s all over,” Sorbara said in a memorable interview on TVO’s The Agenda, suggesting Wynne should consider quitting as leader before the election.

Wynne obviously ignored Sorbara’s suggestion. Instead, she led the Liberals to their worst defeat in history, finishing third with just seven seats and failing to maintain official party status.

Wynne is rightly accepting much of the blame for the devastating loss. So too is David Herle, the man who five years ago succeeded Sorbara as campaign chief and masterminded the Liberals’ 2014 majority victory.

Considered one of the country’s top campaign strategists, Herle disagreed with Sorbara back in 2017 that defeat was inevitable, and he still does.

In a revealing episode on his podcast, The Herle Burly, he said he believes that “after 15 years, defeat was likely, but not inevitable — and even if defeat was inevitable, seven seats was not. There was something wrong with the campaign and I am wrestling with the guilt and the grief of that.”

Herle said Wynne was “the real deal,” offering voters what he termed “the superior product” in the election. Wynne “campaigned superbly and won the debate. She deserved better,” he said flatly.

In the weeks following the election, Herle is still searching for answers to what went wrong and how the Liberals might have fared better.

“This campaign was dramatically different than those before it in terms of the kind of information and messaging that you can do and on what media you can do it, the role of social media and the online organization of the right wing of our politics, the expected attributes of leaders and leadership, adherence or non-adherence to traditional norms of behaviour,” he said.

Herle never could figure out the best way to combat Doug Ford. The Conservative leader was a terrible debater, lacked a full platform, played fast loose with facts, had a shady past and was disliked by many senior Tories, who Ford sneered at as “the elites” within his very own party — and still won easily.

One campaign move that did work for Herle, however, was Wynne’s controversial decision to admit the Liberals would lose five days before election day. Even Ford’s campaign manager, Kory Teneycke, who was a Herle’s guest on the podcast, admits it was successful, saying their internal polls showed the Liberals increased their support by five percentage points, which meant going from having only one or two seats to having seven.

“To be honest, had we done nothing, my fear was that our number would continue to decline,” Herle said.

But the political baggage the Liberals had accumulated after 15 years in power and Wynne’s role in all of it was daunting. Hydro One sell-off, fast-rising electricity rates, gas plant and eHealth bunglings, a touch of homophobia and more fuelled the “time-for-a-change” mood.

In addition, for all her socially progressive programs, Wynne was out of touch with the real fears of middle-class Ontarians, especially those outside the big cities, who were worried about their jobs and their kids’ future and who knew they could never afford to buy $1-million homes, to eat at fancy restaurants or shop at luxury stores.

Sobara may have been right; Wynne likely should have quit last year and given a new leader the chance to run a more respectable, but still not winnable, campaign.

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Today, the road back for the Liberals will be long and hard. Indeed, it will be so tough that Herle is worried for the party’s long-range future. That’s because he sees the Liberals as “the most fragile party in Canada. Third place is a dangerous place to be for the Liberal party.”

It’s the place, though, to which Kathleen Wynne — and Herle himself — have brought the party.

Bob Hepburn is a politics columnist and based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @BobHepburn is a politics columnist and based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter:

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