The race to be leader of the New Democratic Party has rumbled down a long road since it quietly kicked off in January. There have been twists, but the course of the contest has generally followed a familiar route. Candidates came, candidates dropped out, policies were debated, French proficiency was scrutinized, and reporters speculated about who would win and by how much.

Now, finally, it is coming to an end.

Maybe.

Party members have been voting by mail and online since Sept. 18. On Sunday, the fruits of that effort will be revealed at a hotel on the Toronto waterfront. Charlie Angus, Niki Ashton, Guy Caron or Jagmeet Singh may become leader.

Or we may have to wait another week or two to find out who wins.

Chalk it up to the voting process installed by the party for the contest to replace Tom Mulcair as federal leader.

The NDP is voting by ranked ballot, which means each member will rank the candidates in order of preference from one to four. To win, a candidate must have the support of at least 50 per cent of voters. If nobody hits that threshold in the results unveiled Sunday, the fourth-place candidate will be eliminated, and voting will reopen Monday for a second ballot.

That process will repeat until somebody wins 50 per cent plus one vote.

The campaign, in part, has been a referendum on what went wrong in 2015, when hopes of forming government were dashed by Trudeau’s Liberals, and the NDP was relegated back to its traditional slot as a third-place party. The result was deflating for the party and its supporters given the massive success of the Orange Wave in the 2011 election, when the late Jack Layton led the NDP to its historic zenith: 103 seats and status as the official Opposition in the House of Commons.

Each candidate in this race has presented a different version of how to get back to that level of success. Ashton has argued the key is to veer left and win youthful voters who were seduced by the Liberals in 2015. Angus says the NDP became too cautious and bureaucratic, and believes it needs to reconnect with its grassroots base to regain the trust of working people.

Caron, a Quebec MP and economist by training, has pitched himself as the man with the policy chops who can bring in the most Quebec seats, thus preserving the 59-seat beachhead from the 2011 election that was reduced to 16 seats in 2015.

And then there is Jagmeet Singh, the perceived front-runner. His campaign boasts that it brought 47,000 people into the NDP during the leadership race. He has also raised more money than his opponents. The Ontario MPP from Brampton blatantly asserts he will win the race, and has said he is best positioned to expand party ranks by bringing in new members from areas — such as his suburban GTA enclave — where the NDP has traditionally been sidelined.

Karl Belanger, a former close adviser to Layton and Mulcair, said in a recent interview that each candidate has tried to frame their campaign around their “genuine” personality strengths.

He pointed out that the NDP — and its socialist precursor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation — has never shrunk its seat count in consecutive national elections.

“Ultimately winning is what this is all about,” he said. “That is something that is obvious to me.”

Whether that’s possible against Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party remains to be seen. But David Coletto, a political observer and CEO of Abacus Data in Ottawa, said his firm’s polling shows it is at least possible.

Yes, the NDP has fallen from its historic heights under Layton and Mulcair, but many Canadians seem willing to countenance the idea of voting for the social-democratic party.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“You look at the fundamentals and it says to me the NDP is down, but I don’t think they’re out,” Coletto said.

Speaking to reporters outside the House of Commons last week, in what may be one of his last interactions with the media before his successor is announced, Mulcair praised all four candidates in the race.

“I’m expecting us all to pull together and make sure that we support (the next leader) in everything they do, because whatever else happened in the last campaign, we’ve got 44 outstanding Members of Parliament now, really bringing the fight to the Trudeau Liberals,” he said.

Sunday’s first ballot event begins in Toronto at 2:30 p.m.

Read more about: