It’s difficult to figure out just how irrelevant Steve Ashton’s announcement was this week that he’s planning to take another stab at becoming the next leader of Manitoba’s New Democratic Party.

The former NDP cabinet minister’s entrance into the leadership “race” is beyond inconsequential. Pitiful may be too strong a word. But pointless or senseless probably underscores it accurately.

This guy just doesn’t know when to quit, no matter how badly he’s been beaten in the past.

Ashton could barely garner a third of his party’s support during his last two failed leadership attempts, in 2009 and 2015. And those were years when he was still in cabinet. The 61-year-old, who was first elected to the legislature in 1981 when Howard Pawley won his first term in office, couldn’t even hang on to his Thompson seat last year when his party was decimated at the polls. And now he hangs around the legislature annoying his former colleagues and begging to help them prep for question period.

So why is Ashton entering the ring for another round of punishment? Who knows.

Steve is bored. He’s got nothing else to do and even less to offer a party that needs new blood and a new vision now more than ever.

The NDP suffered its worst loss in decades during last year’s provincial election, reducing the party’s representation in the legislature to 14 of 57 seats. The last time the party was that deep in the hole it took 11 years for them to climb out of it. And that was under the leadership of a younger and far more politically astute leader who understood retail politics.

Ashton doesn’t have those qualities. He never did. Which is why his party always rejected him as leader. It’s why he could never get more than a small handful of caucus members to support him. Only three caucus members stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Ashton during Wednesday’s announcement, NDP MLA Jim Maloway – the perennial outsider – and the Marcelino cousins. That’s it.

Ashton is not only a tired old face around the party, he’s an impractical ideologue who occupies the far left of the political spectrum. While that may appeal to some hard-core party members, it doesn’t sell well to the general public.

Ashton believes in big government, state-owned enterprise, high taxes, deficit financing and union-led policy making. He’s an interventionist whose never seen a private-sector industry he didn’t want to nationalize. And while that may be seen as principled to some in the party, it’s simply not marketable to the broader voting public. Which is why Ashton’s leadership campaigns have never made it to the mainstream. And it won’t this time.

NDP leadership candidate Wab Kinew, the MLA or Fort Rouge, is already seen as the party’s presumptive leader. No one knows what kind of leader he may be or where he plans to position himself on the political spectrum. He’s a political rookie who for the most part is an unknown quantity. He’s a well-known advocate for indigenous rights and more recently an LGBTQ-rights convert who has apologized for past homophobic and misogynistic comments he’s made on social media. But beyond a brief stint in opposition, even party members don’t really know what direction Kinew plans to take the party. Will he be closer to the centrist approach of former NDP leader Gary Doer or will he be more of a traditional idealistic NDPer?

Party members will get more insight into that as they approach the Sept. 16 leadership convention. But no matter what Kinew offers, he’s all the party has.

Because Steve Ashton has a better chance of winning a seat in Manitoba’s bible belt than he does of being the next leader of the NDP.