ALBERTA PC VOTE TOMORROW

Keep in mind that voting begins tomorrow in the wild and wooly Alberta PC leadership vote.

The way I see it, the polls have Jim Dinning and Ted Morton as the frontrunners right now. The big battle is for third place and right now it's a tossup between Lyle Oberg, Mark Norris, Ed Stelmach and Dave Hancock, with Gary McPherson running last.

Who knows who will finish in third place, but that is the battle of the moment. The top three finishers will be eligible to compete in the runoff and you can bet that if the third-place finisher is in range to catch up to the other two that he'll be there next week on the final ballot.

I do happen to think that Dinning and Morton are in the lead. Dinning has been running for this job for years and years, the problem is thst too many people are seeing him as another Paul Martin. And apparently he gave money to Martin, too, a big no-no among many Conservatives. But he does have most of caucus onside. So Dinning is seen as more of a "liberal" and more of the establishment choice. Meanwhile Ted Morton is way out there as the "Reformer" of this race: the grassroots, pro-family values, Alberta-first guy. Consequently, he has a lot of the buzz as well, and there are people now predicting he will be in first place tomorrow. I think he'll be another man to watch tomorrow.

But there's also a lot of people who don't like either of these guys. They don't like Dinning because he's too liberal, and Morton is too conservative. The question, then, is can Dinning and Morton be stopped? There's no question those two could stop one another. But the thinking I have is that the third-place finisher might try and get a coalition together of the other five campaigns, or most of the people involved on the other campaigns, in an attempt to vault into second place on the second ballot and come up the middle and win.

That's their only hope and if this was a delegated convention something like that would be easier to achieve. But this isn't a "convention", it's a wide-open vote, and apparently they're still selling memberships as we speak and getting ready to truck people out to the polls to vote. So coming up the middle is going to be difficult for the third-place guy. Keep in mind that back when Ralph Klein won the leadership he trailed Nancy Betkowski on the first ballot in the similar process, and then all the other candidates dropped out and endorsed Betkowski! But then Klein went out and sold memberships and won on the second ballot. So even if you get all the other campaigns to endorse you it doesn't matter. It will be tough for a third-place finisher to win unless the race among the top three candidates is very very close.

It will be interesting to watch what goes down tomorrow and I'm going to try and organize some links to some coverage of this thing. It looks like I'll have to concentrate on finding some blogs that are giving their take on what's going on since these networks are all AWOL when it comes to covering politics. I'm sure a number of Blogging Tories will be doing something.