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Viewing the surge in polling numbers of the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, the New Democrats are trying to act like there’s nothing to worry about, like the Trudeau phenomenon is a temporary infatuation.

The Dippers’ plan, according to a top party strategist, is to ignore Sir Galahad and target their attacks solely on Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. They will continue to portray themselves as the government-in-waiting — even while the numbers show they are the third-place-party in waiting.

That’s where they stand in the latest opinion survey by EKOS which sees, as do other pollsters, a downward trend for the party. (Eds note: Check back with iPolitics on Friday for more on the EKOS poll.) The spiral is ominously evident in their Quebec stronghold where — according to Frank Graves, EKOS chairman — the New Democrats are now behind both the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois.

Across Canada, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair isn’t catching on because the public sees him as an old school politician. He comes across as a grumpy guy, said Graves. The voters’ attitude, he said, can be summed up like this: “We’ve already got a grumpy guy Let’s try someone else.”

This is a criticism the New Democrats want to address. Beginning with their policy convention in Montreal this weekend, they will try to present the more human side of Mulcair. He isn’t about to shave off his beard but strategists want to sell him as a cuddly bear instead of a grizzly. To compliment the softer leader image, the party also wants a more moderate policy pitch: pragmatic as opposed to ideological.

While this sounds reasonable enough, the task facing the New Democrats is daunting. Their status as the official Opposition party is suspect to begin with. Many see their performance in the last election in pushing aside the Liberals as an accident. They expect the natural political order to be restored. They see the Dippers as interlopers, trespassers.

Mulcair isn’t about to shave off his beard but strategists want to sell him as a cuddly bear instead of a grizzly.

That’s not apparent in their performance in the official Opposition role. The New Democrats have a strong front bench with a more impressive array of talent than the small Liberal caucus employs. They are organized and unified — and no one questions Mulcair’s strength as a leader.

But while Mulcair wants to position his party as pragmatic, his lack of enthusiasm for the Keystone XL pipeline and his loud drumming against rapid development of the natural resource sector have tended to create a radical image. The rehoisting of an old NDP position — one which says a fifty-per-cent-plus-one vote is good enough for the secession of Quebec — fed that image. It’s old-school religion.

In Quebec, Mulcair has little choice but to cater to the soft nationalist vote which was key to the party winning an astonishing 59 seats in the last election. But it’s hard to look new and modern when you have to appeal to that base. With Trudeau, said Graves, voters see a shiny new car and they want to give it a test drive.

Strangely, it’s not the young voters who are responsible for the surge in Grit numbers. It’s an across-the-board improvement. The youth vote is still tilted toward the Green Party which, said Graves, is showing surprising strength. “If Trudeau wants to seal the deal,” he said, “he should work out some kind of cooperation pact with the Greens.” Otherwise, Graves added, Harper still has the advantage of big splits on the left.

The New Democrats are banking on the Trudeau bubble bursting. There are many examples of that kind of thing happening, said the party strategist. Christy Clark was supposed to save the Liberals in British Columbia, he said, but she’s about to go down the tubes.

Opinion polls since last fall have shown that most of the new support heading the Liberals’ way is coming from the NDP. While the Conservatives have lost about 20 per cent of their support since the 2011 election — when they won almost forty per cent of the vote — most of this loss was evident before the Liberal leadership campaign began.

No particular policy is responsible for the Trudeau surge. That’s the benefit of being new and untested. With the added policy scrutiny he will get as leader — the type of policy scrutiny Mulcair has received over the last year — the Liberals’ numbers could well start to fall.

That’s the New Democrats’ hope. Though they say their main focus will remain the Conservatives, they realize that their big threat in Quebec and beyond Quebec is a revived Liberal party. If they are to beat back that challenge, they have to retool.

Lawrence Martin is the author of 10 books, including six national bestsellers. His most recent, Harperland, was nominated for the Shaughnessy Cohen award. His other works include two volumes on Jean Chrétien, two on Canada-U.S. relations and three books on hockey.

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