With only a bit more than a month to go to the March 24 leadership vote, and with the first official Quebec debate set for the weekend, the NDP campaign has not even begun to jell.

According to the rough estimates of NDP strategists, as many as half of the party’s members have yet to make a choice between the eight men and women vying to succeed Jack Layton. If one includes those who have yet to firm up a second-ballot choice, that proportion is even higher.

It is still possible that a mushy contest will lead to a mushy result.

A party that seriously had its eyes on winning power would, frankly, not find it so difficult.

A multiplicity of candidates is rarely the equivalent of a multiplicity of equally valid choices and that is especially true with this NDP line-up.

While normally there are many potential considerations that go into the choice of a leader, the exceptional auspices under which this campaign is taking place demand that one take precedence over all the others.

The NDP 2011 breakthrough in Quebec is a historical opportunity that was a very long time coming.

It amounts to the party’s best chance to become a serious contender for federal power since the New Democrats under Bob Rae earned its audition in a major province in 1990.

But there is a potential downside and it is significant.

As the Ontario debacle demonstrated, in major-league politics second chances are few and far between.

When all is said and done, the margin of error presiding over this NDP leadership campaign is probably the narrowest in the party’s 50-year history

If the NDP selects a leader who ends up failing to connect strongly with Canadians outside Quebec, the party will survive. It has enough presence in every province to do so.

But if it picks a leader who is dismissed as a political tourist in Quebec, the NDP could be pushed back to the margins of the House of Commons for another generation or more.

In Quebec, the federal NDP has no provincial partner and its natural ideological allies happen to be two sovereignist parties. The burden of establishing the party on a stable footing will rest squarely on the next leader’s shoulders.

In no small part because their knowledge of Quebec is often second hand, many New Democrats entertain the dangerous misconception that all that it takes to qualify for the task of keeping the party on its feet in the province is a capacity to speak reasonably fluent French.

It was not Layton’s uneven French that eventually caught the ear of so many Quebec voters but rather his personal understanding of the province’s culture, combined with campaign savvy.

There are no crash courses available to acquire the essential skills of a Quebec-savvy leader and fluency in the language is no guarantee of insights into the province’s psyche. Stephen Harper is a case in point.

Another misconception has been that reinforcing the NDP’s connection with Quebec and expanding the party’s reach in the rest of the country could be mutually exclusive propositions.

Over the past month, national columnists from the three major papers have separately suggested that Thomas Mulcair may be the safest gamble on offer in what could be a make-or-break leadership vote for the NDP.

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The National Post’s Rex Murphy, The Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin and fellow Star columnist Tim Harper have all offered different rationales for their conclusion and l will not revisit them.

But what struck me about their assessments is that their respective takes on national politics are more grounded in the rest of Canada than in Quebec. They have seen in Mulcair a bit more than a candidate who would just hang on to Quebec for the NDP.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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