'Tis late and the CBC's pancake makeup weighs heavy on your blogger's face. As all the world must surely know by now, Alberta Premier Alison Redford's hole card turned out to be an ace yesterday and Alberta's 41-year Progressive Conservative dynasty will live a little longer, perhaps a lot longer.

So today there is no joy in Mudville -- whether that place is located in the town of Okotoks, site of the world's largest glacial erratic, or at 24 Sussex Drive -- for the Mighty Flanagan has struck out. You can almost hear the disgruntled Wildrosers chanting "45 years is enough!"

According to the latest poll, Alberta’s election race has tightened significantly, and the province’s One True Conservative Party is now in a statistical tie with the province’s Other One True Conservative Party.

Actually, never mind the “statistical” bit. According to the on-line poll of 902 voters taken over the weekend by Leger Marketing and published this morning in the Postmedia newspapers, the difference in support for the far-right Wildrose Party under Danielle Smith and the not-quite-so-far-right Progressive Conservative Party under Premier Alison Redford is pretty much an honest-to-god dead heat.

We know that being in power for more than four decades makes you lazy. Who knew 41 years in power would make you stupid too?

How else can we explain this strange, listless, disengaged Progressive Conservative campaign? How else to account for the foolish choices that preceded it?

The strategic brain trust now running Premier Alison Redford's Conservative party lit a fire and stood back while the whole rickety Tory edifice began to burn to the ground.

Forum Research Inc. of Toronto was back in the field yesterday doing another Friday night poll of Alberta voter intentions.

The questions asked by the poll, the weird way it asked them and their timing may all provide some insights into why Forum's surveys have consistently produced better results for the Wildrose Party than other public opinion polls by other pollsters.

Another squalid American-style push poll, which has all the hallmarks of a Wildrose Party operation, had telephones dingling in Alberta yesterday evening.

Meanwhile, yet another legitimate poll, this one released Thursday by Return on Insight, shows the Progressive Conservatives under Premier Alison Redford continue to hold a commanding lead among decided voters.

Quite possibly the results of the ROI poll and others like it explain the tactics being used in the push poll.

A push poll, as previously noted in this space, is a political campaigning technique in which a political party or interest group attempts to change the opinions of the people whom they contact by pretending to conduct a poll.

Now that the far-right Wildrose Party is poaching Alberta NDP policy, could we trust them to carry it out?

Doubtful, but you can hardly blame Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith for trying to exploit the near-universal outrage throughout Alberta at the province's shocking electricity prices.

These prices, cripplingly high now and showing no sign of abating thanks to the misconceived and hard-to-understand "deregulation" implemented by the catastrophic Ralph Klein government in the mid-1990s, nevertheless seem unable to inspire any subsequent Progressive Conservative government to do anything about them.

Well, that's one strategy for establishing your polling credibility: If you come up with a poll that other pollsters, bloggers and the usual complainers dismiss as an outlier, do another one that says the same thing.

That's what Forum Research Inc. of Toronto did yesterday, publishing a poll of Alberta voters' intentions that shows the Alberta Progressive Conservatives under Premier Alison Redford unchanged from its survey last month at 38 per cent committed support.

Even with Alberta Premier Alison Redford in a mood to tarry just a little and not call an election until after her government has passed its first budget, only one centrist political party is likely to be in a position to challenge her in all 87 ridings come election day -- the New Democrats.

With 73 candidates already nominated, the Alberta NDP under Brian Mason will have no trouble going into the election with a full slate capable of confronting Redford's Progressive Conservative government from the left, while the Wildrose Party led by Danielle Smith takes them on with a full slate from the right.

Not only that, but the New Democrats will be the only Alberta party, including the government, with a leader who has actually led his or her party through an election.