Eighteen months after winning the Liberal leadership — mission improbable — Kathleen Wynne has won mission impossible: An elusive majority government is now hers.

No longer governing on borrowed time, she is empowered by a direct majority mandate of her own, having crushed Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak and beaten back her NDP rival, Andrea Horwath.

Ontario’s 25th premier is not going anywhere soon: It will be a long time — four years, to be precise — before a suddenly irrelevant, third-place NDP, which triggered the election, can fight another one. In those next years, Wynne will need the stability of majority government to grapple with a chronic deficit while avoiding labour strife from continued restraint.

Wynne forged a new coalition of the willing — and the fearing — to rally the province’s progressive and centrist voters against the spectre of a Tory restoration. By joining forces, they vastly outnumbered the hard-right Tory rump of Mike Harris, embodied by Hudak, that now seems in decline after the party’s fourth consecutive election defeat.

It’s not just Hudak who is looking for a new role in the aftermath of this humbling defeat, but the Progressive Conservatives who must sort out their place in Ontario’s politics — and the vote-rich GTA — if they are to reverse their slide.

Horwath sought to divide the left and conquer the centre, but gained nothing. Instead, Wynne fired up two partisan bases — her own, and Horwath’s, to energize her own tired Liberal supporters while enlisting terrified New Democrats.

Governments typically defeat themselves, especially when accumulated grievances spark a broad desire for change. But in this election the two opposition parties achieved the reverse — driving people back into the arms of the Liberals because people didn’t like the alternatives.

All that talk about the gas-fired power plants, which the opposition harped on from the last days of the 2011 election until the last days of the 2014 campaign, turned out to be water — or gas — under the bridge. Voters — those who even followed the issue — probably concluded that all parties screw things up, and were more interested in bigger issues of the future, not big scandals of the past.

The Tories and New Democrats failed to focus — with prudence, precision and wisdom — on the over-arching ballot question weighing on voters’ minds: Jobs and the economy.

Not just jobs and the economy, but underlying fears that jobs are fading and the economy is foundering.

By misreading those profound worries and resorting to gimmicky diversions, the Tories and New Democrats undermined their own campaigns.

Hudak tried to take ownership of the economic issue with “shock and awe” tactics that grabbed headlines but missed the mark. His signature “Million Jobs Plan,” rather than reassuring voters, only rattled them.

The one million target sounded gimmicky, the math was gimmicky (it didn’t add up), and the plan was at war with itself: The promise of long-term job gains looked like a long shot, while the peril of Hudak’s proposed 100,000 public sector job cuts seemed all too real.

Hudak’s hokey oratory — “hope is around the corner” — sounded like a dead end to most voters. His tough talk about job cuts and rapid fire deficit reduction sounded like reckless boasts. The ballot question was reversed: Instead of a referendum on the Liberal record, it turned on Tory recklessness.

Horwath had little serious to say about the economy, focusing instead on populist gimmicks of her own (taking the HST off hydro) and a popularity contest. Banking on her own high approval ratings, the NDP leader tried to win a contest over credibility — first asserting that Wynne couldn’t be trusted to deliver on her promises, later claiming that Wynne led a corrupt government.

Against that backdrop, Wynne hit back hard.

She ridiculed Hudak’s math and whipped up fears of mass firings. She appealed to progressive voters to back her Liberals as the best bet to fend off the Tory bugaboo Horwath had unleashed.

Wynne’s path to victory wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t all that unseemly, either. Equal parts persuader and scaremonger, the Liberal leader gave as good as she got. Libelled by Hudak as a criminal conspirator, labelled by Horwath as a corruption ringleader, she lashed out in her own way, in her own time.

First, Wynne neutralized their mudslinging — by cleaning up the muck inherited from Dalton McGuinty with new rules. Then she came clean by apologizing — fessing up for the messing up of her predecessor.

Next, she came up with a progressive plan of her own, cobbled together in the spring budget: A bold public pension plan modelled on and supplementing the CPP, plus wage hikes for the working poor.

But before her budget plan could gain traction on the campaign trail, it was utterly overshadowed by Hudak’s gambit to grab the election agenda with budget cuts and job cuts. It was a gift Wynne couldn’t refuse, pivoting against Hudak, while poaching from Horwath’s base.

For Hudak, the vote was a humiliation. For Horwath, it was a repudiation. While she held on to her seat count, the core of her campaign — that Wynne led a corrupt government — was rejected by an electorate that upgraded the Liberals to majority government.

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For Wynne, the election was a personal triumph as much as a political victory. She revived a Liberal brand in decline, bringing with her an image of personal probity that overcame the party’s heavy baggage after a series of scandals and boondoggles.

After 11 years in power, the Liberals have defied all predictions of doom to win four more years in office. Without Wynne, they couldn’t have achieved such a remarkable renewal.

Martin Regg Cohn’s provincial affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn

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