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Andrea Horwath has one big thing going for her in the Ontario election — people like her.

They like her because she’s the girl from next door. They like her because, as a single mom, she’s paid her dues and then some. They like her because she’s personable and authentic.

Her likeability is the reason she wins the “best premier” question in the polls, even though the New Democratic Party is in third place. In the latest Ipsos-Reid, she’s ranked as best premier at 38 per cent, while Kathleen Wynne who actually is premier is at 32 per cent, with Conservative leader Tim Hudak at 30 per cent.

This is the inverse of voting intention in the Ipsos poll, which has the Conservatives at 35 per cent, the Liberals at 31 per cent and the NDP at 28 per cent. The Tories were down four points from the previous week because of Hudak’s plan to cut 100,000 jobs across the Ontario public service, while the NDP were up four points because of Horwath.

You’d think the NDP would have been doing cartwheels on the weekend. Instead, this being Dipperland, some prominent names in the party were doing their best to screw things up. In his online Globe and Mail column Friday, longtime party organizer Gerry Caplan published an open letter to Horwath. “Your election campaign has frankly been a mess,” he wrote. His advice? “Fire (your) advisers.” In the middle of the campaign? Yeah, right.

Hours later, the Gang of 34 sent a Horwath an e-mail that looked like a clip and paste of Caplan’s broadside, denouncing her for opposing “the most progressive budget in recent Ontario history” and helping to elect “the most right-wing and vicious leader of the PCs since Mike Harris.”

OMG! It just happened that this missive was “obtained” by the CBC’s Evan Solomon, on whose show, Power & Politics, Caplan is a regular panelist. In politics, there are no coincidences.

If you were to ask: “What would Jack Layton do?” The answer is that he might have done a better job than Horwath of keeping everyone in the tent. But he would have generally have supported her move from the doctrinaire left to the progressive centre. It’s how he moved the federal party from fourth place to official opposition.

Horwath is playing to consumer and pocketbook issues for middle class voters. “Fundamentals for Families,” she calls it.

For example, she would exempt hydro bills from the HST. So if your hydro bill is $200 per month, that would be a saving of $26 per month, or more than $300 per year. That’s an attention getter.

She would reduce auto insurance rates by 15 per cent. So if you were paying $1,000 per year now, you would be paying $850 in the future, a saving of $150. Details to come in terms of discussing this with the auto insurance industry.

For families wanting home improvements, there would be a home retrofit fund. Jack would certainly have approved of that.

Horwath would cut emergency room waiting times, obviously by adding staff. Couples having difficulty conceiving children would have the first round of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment paid by the province, as has been the case in Quebec since 2010.

She would raise corporate taxes, but only from 11.5 to 12.5 per cent. So she can’t be accused of campaigning on the backs of business, undoubtedly adding to the annoyance of the Gang of 34.

For the youth cohort, the 18-to-24 demographic, she’s promising a tuition freeze, as well as forgiving the interest on student debt. “It’s not acceptable,” she said at her platform launch, “that people finish their post-secondary studies and have debts the size of mortgages.”

With all of this, she also promises a balanced budget by 2017, the same year as in the Liberal budget she was going to defeat, as well as putting an end to Liberal waste and scandals such the $1.1 billion cancellation costs for the two cancelled gas power plants in suburban Toronto, or the $9.3 million bonus paid to the former CEO of the Ornge air ambulance service. Summing up the Liberal legacy of scandal, Horwath says it’s time to put the Liberals “in the penalty box.” It’s a good way of putting it, because everyone gets it.

As for her promise to balance the books, she says fiscal responsibility is part of “the DNA of the NDP”. Well, not the Ontario NDP of Bob Rae from 1990-95, not the NDP of the Gang of 34, but the NDP of western provinces, the NDP of Allan Blakeney and Roy Romanow in Saskatchewan, the NDP of Gary Doer in Manitoba. And yes, the NDP of Tommy Douglas, the founding father of the party, and its most revered figure. The NDP of balanced budgets.

What Horwath is clearly trying to do is win over voters who are fed up with the Liberals, but turned off by the Conservatives. She’s also positioned the NDP as a party of fiscal responsibility, a reminder that under the Liberal watch, Ontario’s debt has doubled to $300 billion, while its current deficit of $12.5 billion is twice that of Ottawa and other provinces combined.

If all this puts her to the right of the Liberals, and offends the delicate sensibilities of the socialist elites, so be it. She’s campaigning where elections are won—in the centre.

L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of five books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.