Article content continued

What’s going on? Why, in particular, are the Liberals playing this game? The textbook approach to winning power, after all, is to play to the median voter, not the left wing of the left wing. To be sure, the Liberals perennial strategy is to lure NDP leaners into the fold, usually by frightening them with tales of what the Conservatives would do to them if ever they were so foolish as to “split the vote.” But they are at most times constrained to keep at least one eye on their right flank, lest more fiscally conservative Blue Liberals decamp for the Tories. Not now, apparently.

You can see, perhaps, why the Wynne Liberals would have abandoned the centre. They are so far back in the polls they must be concerned that the NDP not pull ahead of them, and become the party of choice for voters seeking to “stop the Tories.” But the Trudeau Liberals are still very much in the hunt, having closed the gap with the Conservatives in recent polls.

The Harper Tories, it is true, were all over the map, ideologically. But the Scheer Tories are simply inert

I think a contributing factor in both cases is that the Blue Liberals are not so much in play as they might be expected to be — because the Conservatives are not offering them an attractive enough alternative. They might, were they not so distracted, as a Conservative friend has put it, by “this populist moment” they are in.

Had the provincial Conservatives elected the moderate Christine Elliott as their leader, the election might as well have been called right then. But with Doug Ford at the helm, the Wynne Liberals can afford to gamble on centrist voters being so repelled as to hold their noses and vote Liberal, without prejudice to their efforts to pander to the NDP.