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But, after all, roughly 100 per cent of the United Conservatives were people who supported uniting Alberta’s conservatives and living with the result. Jason Kenney’s problem is, on the precipice of the election, the kind of problem one might like to have— a lot of people intend to vote for you despite misgivings about your leader, in order to kick out the likeable one.

Political lore suggests that favourability ratings are more of a leading indicator than vote intention numbers, which provide only a snapshot of the moment. (It’s always a “snapshot” in newspaper talk, for some reason.) But I’m afraid that’s the kind of political rule that applies until it doesn’t.

Everything non-quantitative about Alberta’s political mood suggests that Albertans are in the throes of a revolt over core aspects of their identity. They are being challenged from without over the moral legitimacy of a fossil-fuel economy on which many or most of them have built lives, careers, and all the appurtenances of a civilization. (To beat a familiar point to death: even if you don’t work in the patch and never have, you are probably here in Alberta because of it, one way or another.)

Everything non-quantitative about Alberta's political mood suggests that Albertans are in the throes of a revolt over core aspects of their identity

Notley works as hard as Jason Kenney to affirm that legitimacy, but suggests by what she does as premier that fossil fuels need to be tamed and transcended. Kenney’s message is one continuous roar of “To hell with that!”

Probably every newspaper column ever written should end with the words “It is really a little more complicated than that,” and it is. Personalities matter, and there is a fine line in politics between authenticity and trustworthiness. But it is not as though Rachel Notley does not have authenticity concerns. She spends an awful lot of time condemning the memory of Ralph Klein, perhaps the last politician Albertans liked as well as they like her, while exploiting the financial position he created for Alberta. She has been able to run a countercyclical Keynesian policy in Alberta because Ralph had already handled the hard part that involved that derided virtue, austerity. There are plenty of Albertans who voted for both these people. But this is a sales pitch she can’t make, and won’t.

• Email: ccosh@postmedia.com | Twitter: colbycosh