My political-junkie friends are in a swoon. They have a new love interest – a burly baritone with a beard. Suddenly he's a contender. "Tom Mulcair may be the next prime minister," gushed one headline on Sunday.

You can see why the pundits are so ecstatic. The three federal parties are now running neck and neck, at least on paper. The fresh NDP surge introduces a brand-new storyline, full of tantalizing possibilities, strange bedfellows, dangerous liaisons, and kinky coalition combinations. A plucky blonde just stomped all over the ruling-party big shots of Canada's most macho province and drove them to the brink of oblivion. Anything can happen next. Let your fantasies run wild! But are voters falling for Tom Mulcair as hard as the pundits are? Or are they simply desperate for the least-bad alternative to Stephen Harper?

Right now the answer is, they're desperate. "I absolutely refuse to vote for Harper again," declared one person at my Saturday evening gathering of random friends (who are no more unreliable than the polls). He has voted for him twice. But he's had enough.

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The default for soft-core conservatives has always been the Liberals. There's just one problem – Justin. Even Liberals secretly admit that if their leader's name were Gaston Tremblant, he'd still be a high-school drama teacher. "He has good people around him," they insist. It's not clear who they're trying to reassure – other people, or themselves.

The polls appear to be full of good news for Mr. Mulcair. They show the NDP leading in B.C. and challenging the other two main parties in Ontario. In Quebec the NDP holds a commanding lead. But Ipsos Public Affairs CEO Darrell Bricker cautions that sexy speculation about election outcomes is way too premature. Most of these are robo-polls, which means that their accuracy is dubious and their response rates hover around 1 per cent.

In fact, Mr. Mulcair is largely unknown outside Quebec.

Although he is the leader of the Opposition, the media have treated this fact as a fluke, as if the collapse of the Liberals in the last election were some bizarre mistake that will be erased soon enough. To introduce himself to the public, Mr. Mulcair has launched a cross-country tour that his strategists hope will give him "a richer, more detailed storyline" that people can relate to.

Of course, the storyline you try to give yourself isn't necessarily the one that sticks. Stephen Harper's storyline is that he's "competent, responsible and in charge." But the storyline that sticks is "arrogant, mean and condescending." Justin Trudeau's storyline is "champion of the middle class." But the one that sticks is "wishy-washy, privileged, and none too smart."

Mr. Mulcair, too, is aiming at the vast middle class, which, he pointedly reminds us, he actually grew up in. "We worked very hard and nobody gave us anything," he tells audiences, trying his best to not look as snarly as he does in the House of Commons.

The NDP no longer mentions the "working class," a quaint label that tends to make middle-class people nervous, and is also not a very apt description for the students, academics, and other white-collar public-sector workers who make up most of the NDP's constituency. Its old working-class supporters disappeared long ago. So Mr. Mulcair's task is to persuade enough of the lumpenbourgeoisie that the sky won't fall if they vote NDP. After all, he can point out, Alberta is still pumping oil (at least for now).

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On the face of it, his platform doesn't sound ridiculously scary – a minimum wage of $15 for federal workers, universal daycare (eventually), tax hikes for fat-cat corporations. Personally, I think those are lousy ideas, and how we'll pay for it, who knows? But none of that may matter. As the disaffected ex-Harper voter said, "He's not crazy, and that's good enough for me."

I have no idea where this three-way goes, and neither does anybody else. Maybe the burly baritone will flame out. Or maybe he'll squash the kid and take his votes away. But there's one thing I can guarantee. Between now and election day, you can expect a lot of heavy breathing.