Ontario PC leadership race

Nope, with the PCs its all done in advance so there can be no between ballot maneouvring. Keep in mind that Hillier let it be known that Hudak was his second choice a while ago before people had actually cast teir votes - so he had the ability to influence how his supporters filled out their ballots. Whatever Elliott says today will not affect a single solitary vote.

Apparently, if Hudak wins, the Tories have a plan that will allow him to visit every riding during the campaign. Here's a leaked copy of the visual for the concept:

Seriously, I'm sure that I'm not the only one here who has noticed the uncanny resemblance between Hudak and Michael Keaton. If you substituted Deb Hutton for Andie McDowell in the graphic above, I'm quite sure that no one could tell that it wasn't Hudak.

aka Mycroft wrote:

If all the votes are already counted why are they dragging this out so long?

To create the illusion of excitement an give us some figures to play with..

As I understood itb asically they counted the ballots cast and came up with no clear winner and Hillier 4th to be eliminated. Then  they sorted out  Hillierrs balots to the second choice of the remaining three  Primarliy ??l . No clear winner and Ellito third to be eliminated.they  are now assigning Elliots  ballots amongst the + remaining 2   if any of her ballots had Hiller as a second choice they just assigned them to the third choice).Agin intersing is Any elliot supporters listed no second choice. In between they announced the prelimianry results.

What would be interesting is to see is how many Hillier suppoters stayed home , listing no second choice (If they were allowed to do that) and how many y went to Hudak and how many to Klees.or maybe even Elliot  What we presuambly will neve know is what would have happened if Elliot maned to beak out Klees, how many of his supporters would have gone to her and how many to Hudak.

I agree with Mycroft - can't see how Hudak loses at this point. Ahh, another of Paul Wells' "Rules of Politics" in action - for any given situation, Canadian politics will tend to the least exciting possible outcome. 

Hudak is probably the best choice for them right now. The rank-and-file were probably disinclined to go with Elliott, who despite her flat-tax proposals was always perceived as the "Red Tory" candidate. The popular wisdom in the Ontario PC party seems to be that they need Common Sense Redux, not another latte-sipping sushi-eating urban John Tory type. Plus her obvious association with the federal party was not going to do the Ontario PCs any favours in the current climate. In retrospect, short of a first-ballot victory (or near victory) I can't see how she was going to win this thing, seeing as she was probably the third or fourth choice of most of the other candidates' voters.

Hudak's got the 'young family man' image and hails from exurbia, so one would think he will have the most appeal to the suburban 905 voters that Harris courted so effectively (although he seems to have done relatively poorly in the GTA in the leadership balloting). He is likely to be a more effective critic of McGuinty than Tory was. It's doubtful he'll win in 2011, but as long as the Tories show some improvement he'll likely get a second shot in 2015.

Closing for length.