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The NDP managed to win four seats, up from the two they held at dissolution, making the party a winner of sorts on Monday night. Liberals dropped to three seats and lost official Opposition status but managed to avoid electoral extinction.

Wildrose leader Danielle Smith ran a smooth campaign and proved herself a capable politician but there will be a sense of disappointment this morning among her supporters who thought they were on the verge of an upset victory.

If the Wildrose had won and defeated the 41-year-old Tory dynasty, it would have been an election for the history books. Instead, it will be one for the political science books, as experts explain how pollsters got it so wrong.

“Those polls did not reflect the reality that we were seeing on the ground,” said Stephen Carter, the PC party’s chief campaign strategist who also ran Redford’s leadership campaign last year. “Some pollsters are going to have to write some letters explaining where they went wrong within their methodology because it’s very clear that they did. Their methodology was off.”

Carter had been insisting for the past week that his party had turned the corner and that Calgarians, who had flirted with the Wildrose, were shifting back to the PCs. He attributed it to Redford sticking to her message that the world was changing and Alberta needed to move forward under her leadership, not backward with the Wildrose.

“It was just solid hard work getting out there and listening to people presenting a positive vision of what Alberta could be and our role and place within the country and within the world,” said Carter who has just solidified his reputation as a political miracle worker. He ran the come-from-behind victory for Naheed Nenshi’s mayoralty race in 2010 and followed it up with Redford’s unexpected leadership win in 2011. And now he’s helped orchestrate Redford’s own “miracle on the prairies” victory that seemed so impossible just a few weeks ago.