To follow the 2011 Liberal election campaign has been like watching a plane crash in slow motion.

Even from the sidelines, it has become a stomach-churning experience.

One can only imagine how it feels to be sitting in the cockpit as every manoeuvre fails to at least put the campaign back on a level course.

“The end of the world” was how one shaken lifelong Liberal insider described his party’s slide to third place behind the NDP this week.

If that trend holds until voting day, it is certainly the end of the federal world as Canadians have known it.

Throughout its distinguished history, the Liberal Party of Canada has never been further from power than official opposition. When its leader was not the prime minister, he was the prime-minister-in-waiting.

Nothing in the culture of the federal Liberals has prepared them for life as a third party.

That culture may account for the blind spot that has brought the party to the edge of this abyss.

One of the most remarkable features of the current campaign is that the Liberal team brought this election upon itself.

Past failed leaders of the opposition such as Stockwell Day and Stéphane Dion had the rug pulled from under them by wily prime ministers who rushed them to an election for partisan advantage.

John Turner and Kim Campbell each inherited the mantle of prime minister at the tail end of five-year mandates.

But Michael Ignatieff and his strategists chose the timing of this battle as long as six months ago.

They did so with the pre-election wind squarely in their party’s face and in the absence of any tangible indication that it was about to turn in its favour.

Rather than focus on the tea leaves of the election to come, they looked into the entrails of the previous one and came away with the omen that Ignatieff could not possibly do worse than Dion in 2008.

A reduced Conservative minority government was their worst-case scenario.

In most ways, Ignatieff did do better. The Liberal leader has turned out to be at least twice the campaigner that his predecessor was. His campaign has been a model of discipline and relative grace under duress.

But the Liberal game plan overlooked the possibility that Jack Layton might also run a better campaign than last time.

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It is not that the possibility was not in the air. Pre-election polls pegged Layton higher than Ignatieff in the leadership ratings. In Quebec he had become the most popular federalist leader on the ballot and his party was already on the move.

Liberal strategists did not factor a potentially surging NDP into their calculations because they presumed the Liberals were playing against the Conservatives in the major leagues and the NDP was not.

They approached the election with the mindset of a governing party but the physique of a third party.

When they plunged headlong in a spring campaign, the Liberals had been mired in the mid-twenties in the polls for an unprecedented length of time; they were at a historical low behind the NDP in Quebec and exhibiting little signs of life in the Prairies.

A base can only erode for so long — as the Liberal base has for decades — before it starts to disintegrate.

As dangerous as the past month has turned out to be, the next few days could be more perilous. For the Liberals, things could still get worse.

The so-called orange wave of the NDP could turn into a tsunami and sweep into Ontario. Or the sight of the NDP in the official opposition window with attending speculation that Monday’s vote could put Layton within reach of the Prime Minister’s Office could see the right flank of the Liberals collapse to the Conservatives.

On the highway to Montreal’s Trudeau airport — one of the rare landmarks of the past Liberal glory in Quebec — there is a big Ignatieff billboard. “Quebecers have the power to change things,” it proclaims.

That part of the Liberal message has obviously resonated.

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