“Just what were you guys thinking in calling a double-long election campaign?” I asked a friend who is a member of the federal Conservatives’ senior strategy team.

The conventional thinking is that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his team asked the governor general to drop the writ for the Oct. 19 vote more than a month early to starve their opponents of cash.

The Tories were thought to be the only party with all the cash (more than $25 million) already in the bank to sustain just the traditional 37-day battle. But a doubly long campaign permits parties to nearly double the amount they may spend according to election finance laws. And since the Tories also have the broadest base of small donors, they are also believed to be the only party that can tap enough donors to raise so much extra cash.

“That’s certainly part of it,” my pal admits. Since money is the lifeblood of politics, stretching out the campaign as long as possible could give the Tories a huge tactical advantage.

“For sure. We thought that we would either run the other guys out of cash early or force them to hold on to their cash until the latter days. Either way it was a bonus for us. Either they wouldn’t have money left during the last couple of weeks and we would have the field to ourselves at the very time most voters are making up their minds. Or we’d get out ahead and have the first few weeks to ourselves when voters were forming their first impressions.”

“But it’s way more than money,” he added.

In a nutshell, the Tories went early in hopes of wringing all the bad news out of the campaign before this weekend (and running Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair short of cash).

The Mike Duffy trial, the weak loonie, the soft recession in the first half of this year – the Tories were sure the Liberals and New Dems couldn’t resist the temptation to jump on those issues often in the early days of the election.

And they were right. Mulcair and Trudeau have been almost shrill in their attacks on the Tories’ ethics and on their economic management.

“We were hoping they’d either wear themselves out, run out of things to say or just annoy voters by saying the same things over and over for 70 days.”

It’s kind of a Rope-a-Dope ploy, baiting the opposition into flailing away at Harper and the Tories until Mulcair and Trudeau are worn out or voters are worn out from hearing their incessant whining. Then in the last few weeks or even just the last few days, the Tories intend to come out swinging.

It’s a good strategy, but is it enough? Is attempting to make the other guys lose enough to help the Tories win? Or do Harper and his team need to give voters a positive reason to vote for them, rather than just against the other guys?

The template for this election is probably not this past spring’s Alberta election but rather this past spring’s U.K. election.

In Britain, all the chattering classes wrote off David Cameron and the Tories early, mostly because they permitted their personal and intellectual hatred for him to cloud their observations of what was occurring.

In the U.K., Cameron went strongly negative in the last few weeks and proved all the pundits wrong.

So the short answer is “yes,” our Tories might be able to win by staying negative. But I think they’d win even bigger if they gave Canadians positive reasons to re-elect them.

lorne.gunter@sunmedia.ca