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This was not, needless to say, the kind of race the party had hoped to see. Historically a party that has struggled to make inroads with immigrant and urban voters, the Conservatives had an opportunity in the current race to dispel the bitter taste left by the past election campaign, with its niqab bans and snitch lines.

Well, fat chance of that now. The pandering to the most extreme elements of the party has left many longstanding Conservatives aghast. There are, to be sure, candidates who have resisted this tendency, in favour of the more expansive pitch the party will need to win elections: Michael Chong, Erin O’Toole, Andrew Scheer and Lisa Raitt among them. Alas, all are thought to be well back in the pack.

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What will be noticed about at least some of these candidates, however, is that they have strong support among a particular subset of Conservatives: members of Parliament. O’Toole leads all candidates with the endorsement of 26 sitting MPs; Scheer is not far behind with 23. If it were up to the party’s MPs to choose the next leader, it would probably be one of the two. By contrast, the three candidates currently judged the frontrunners in the race — Bernier, O’Leary and Leitch — have the support of just 11 sitting MPs between them.

This is odd. If anyone would know the candidates best, at least among the 12 current or former MPs in the field, you would think it would be their fellow members of caucus. These are people, moreover, who have to get elected for a living, and have had some success at doing so: as such their sense of which candidate had the most electoral appeal ought to carry some weight. Perhaps most important, they will have to work with, and under, whoever is elected.