'While she is willing to say who won’t win on Thursday — namely, herself — she is asking voters to figure out for themselves where their votes will be either useful or wasted'

Politicians are fond of saying that they don’t deal in hypothetical questions.

But Ontario Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne has just answered the mother of all hypothetical questions — the what’s-going-to-happen-in-the-election question.

As Wynne has now said, succinctly, repeatedly and often emotionally since this past weekend, she’s going to lose her job as premier when Ontarians vote this Thursday.

“I was simply stating the reality that it does not look like it’s there for us as a government,” she reiterated on CBC Ottawa Morning Tuesday.

The power handover won’t happen immediately — Wynne stays in her job until a new premier is sworn into office, and that often takes a week or two after an election. The soon-to-be-ex-premier is not saying who she expects to be her successor — demonstrating that there’s only so far she’ll plunge into the what-if world of the hypothetical.

And that’s the problem with this declaration — it doesn’t go far enough. If Wynne wants to help get more Liberals elected locally — which she says is the purpose of this pre-election concession — then she’s going to have to give some more details of what she thinks will happen Thursday when Ontarians go to the polls.

She’s going to have to go the full hypothetical.

“When people have said to me ‘you’re giving up,’ it’s the opposite,” Wynne told CBC host Robyn Bresnhan. “I am absolutely not giving up. What I am saying is let’s get those great local Liberals to Queen’s Park.”

But who are those great local Liberals? Does Wynne have a list of candidates who stand a chance against the surging Conservatives and New Democrats?

Of course she does.

It’s said the Liberal’s campaign is now winding down to a save-the-furniture effort in these final days, concentrating resources only on a handful of ridings where the party’s candidates could squeak by.

But Wynne doesn’t want to make that list too public — even though it’s crucial to the calculation she wants voters to make.

The hard truth is that all potential Liberal votes are not the same in the coming election. Some could help get an MPP elected here and there for the red team across the province — enough for what Wynne hopes will be a balance of power for her party against a minority Conservative or New Democrat government.

But in other ridings, a Liberal vote could divide the left-leaning voters, ensuring a Conservative comes right up the middle and wins more votes than either the Liberals or the NDP. Asked about that risk on air Tuesday, Wynne said: “People will figure that out. People will sort that out in their ridings.”

Really?

While Wynne is willing to say who won’t win on Thursday — namely, herself — she is asking voters to figure out for themselves where their votes will be either useful or wasted. That’s a huge presumption of voters’ attention, time and, perhaps most of all, their willingness to sacrifice their ballots to strategic calculation.

If you’ve been covering elections for a while, as I have, you learn that campaigns and voting are not all strategy and calculation — for the voters or the politicians. There is plenty of emotion involved, whether it’s in asking for support or standing alone in front of that blank ballot, choosing where to put that precious “X.”

Candidates need to believe that winning is possible, to keep getting out of bed every morning, marching up to those doors and making their case to be elected.

When people say that politics is a club, it’s on this point I believe they’re right — those who have put their names on a ballot have a deep, shared understanding of how huge that is emotionally for anyone who stands as a candidate. A belief that you’re going to win, even against huge odds, right up to the final hours before results are in, is a major part of the emotional investment.

I’ve walked door to door with no-hope candidates: it’s an experience that more people should see, as an illustration of what faith looks like in democracy.

This is all why Wynne’s early concession is remarkable and rare. It is treating Thursday’s choice as a logical calculation for voters and candidates alike. It’s a hyper-hypothetical reply if you go by this definition: “A question based on certain proven or assumed facts, and formulated to arrive at a generalized answer applicable in most such situations in the absence of dependable data.”

In Tuesday’s interview, Wynne wasn’t getting drawn into questions about future coalitions or whether she planned to resign as leader when the voting was all over. She was, in effect, trying to fall back into the old political dodge of not answering what-if questions.

But Wynne has already crossed that line and I’m not sure there’s any going back.

If Thursday’s vote requires strategy and calculation by once or would-be Liberal voters, people need those “certain proven or assumed facts.” Namely, they need more information about how to use their votes wisely and that means Wynne and her team are going to have to be coldly candid about individuals’ chances.

Are they willing to be that hypothetical?

I’m betting not — which is why politicians like to say they don’t deal in hypotheticals. But of course they do — and all the time. After all, an election platform is kind of a “what-if,” conditional proposition.

The no-hypothetical rule is basically a way to avoid hard questions.

And now that Wynne has decided to answer one difficult one about her own chances, she might have to answer some more too.