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Well-run campaigns don’t always add up to a win at the ballot box, and the Liberal surge was likely necessary to her victory.

Still, when the votes were counted last week, McKenna and her team had made Ottawa Centre history: she won more than 42 per cent of the vote, the best Liberal result in the riding’s history, leaving fewer votes cast for each of the NDP, Conservatives and Greens compared with 2011.

The 28,988 votes cast for Dewar — or 38.5 per cent — didn’t deliver him a win but were still the second-highest total of his career. He won with fewer votes in both 2006 and 2008. The difference this time: an additional 10,000 voters turned up to the polls, making Ottawa Centre the riding with the highest voter turnout in the country.

McKenna’s team is taking part of the credit for that high turnout, arguing their relentless hard work, and highly organized ground game, got people to the polls, both metaphorically and physically.

But the most important lesson of McKenna’s success can be found in the hole that appeared in the toe of the red shoes that her campaign team presented her with the day the writ dropped

“Hope and hard work wasn’t just a slogan,” McKenna says, smiling.

“You know she’s a swimmer,” said fellow Liberal MP Adam Vaughan, who defeated the NDP’s Olivia Chow in Toronto’s Trinity-Spadina. “She built her campaign the way a swimmer would build her campaign. It was all endurance.”

McKenna started knocking on doors after winning the Liberal nomination in May 2014. By Oct. 19, 522 days later, she and her team of 500 volunteers had knocked on 100,000 doors, many of them twice. In the early days, many residents had no idea who she was or why she was at their door. As the election approached, that began to change.