Christy Clark's uber-dog status in the first two months of the B.C. Liberal leadership race was based largely on opinion surveys that showed she was the preferred candidate of the public at large.
But we weren't going to know until the deadline for signing up new party members expired Friday whether the buzz around the former education minister's campaign would translate into widespread support.
Apparently it has.
While Ms. Clark is not releasing her final tally, and the numbers game can often be a dicey proposition, her competitors acknowledge that she has likely come out on top of the signup blitz. On leave from her job as a radio talk-show host, Ms. Clark is believed to have signed up in the neighbourhood of 25,000 new members, although the number could be higher. That compares to 17,500 (or more) for Kevin Falcon, 10,000 (or more) for Mike de Jong and approximately 8,000 (more or less) for George Abbott - the other three candidates considered to have a shot at winning.
The B.C. Liberal party membership, which is believed to have stood at 35,000 when the campaign began, is now at 98,000, according to one source.
In any event, Ms. Clark now has an even bigger target on her back.
To her credit, she has not run the kind of staid, cautious campaign often associated with front-runners. She has been willing to take risky policy positions. In some cases, this has given her opponents much-needed ammunition and, in the process, revealed just how cutthroat the campaign has become.
When Ms. Clark recently announced that she was abandoning her idea of holding a free vote in the legislature on the HST and was now fully behind a provincial referendum in June, Mr. Abbott and Mr. Falcon all but suggested she was unfit to govern. "On these significant issues, the public wants certainty and clarity, not more double-speak and misdirection," said Mr. Abbott. Mr. Falcon accused his competitor of being guilty of "ready, fire, aim," policy making.
Previously, Ms. Clark was attacked by both men for her idea of introducing a new provincial holiday that they said would cost the economy hundreds of millions of dollars.
Late last week, Mr. Abbott admitted a member of his campaign team set up a website designed to embarrass Ms. Clark, after it was revealed that a member of her campaign team had signed up her house cat to a party membership. The kitties4christy website was registered three days before the story about the cat broke in The Globe and Mail, leaving many to suspect that it was Mr. Abbott's campaign that first got wind of the cat tale and leaked it.
The Clark campaign was also angered by a letter Mr. Abbott wrote to the president of the Liberal party about the cat signup in which he used the word "fraud" in association with the incident several times.
Meantime, at an agricultural trade show in Abbottsford recently, a member of Mr. Abbott's campaign was handing out copies of stories written by Conservative blogger Alex Tsakumis that suggest Ms. Clark has deeper ties to the B.C. Rail scandal than she has acknowledged. It has also been noted that Mr. Tsakumis, who has been the author of an ongoing and mostly withering attack on Ms. Clark's candidacy, is a publicly declared friend of Ray Castelli, chief campaign strategist for Mr. Falcon.
One of Ms. Clark's rivals also tried to poach her chief organizer in one of the ethnic communities.
"I expect Christy will continue to be attacked by other campaigns or their proxies," Mike McDonald, Ms. Clark's campaign co-chair, told me Monday.
Without question, Mr. Falcon and Mr. Abbott both see Ms. Clark, rumoured to have already begun holding meetings regarding the transition of power, as their chief rival. And so to some degree their strategies are the same: to try and discredit her as much possible.
Mr. Falcon has so far not resorted to any dirty tricks. He has, however, suggested that the party change the format of the leadership debates, which have mostly been boring affairs designed to ensure that no candidate is truly tested.
Mr. Falcon believes he can demonstrate he is more premier-ready than Ms. Clark in a format that requires the candidates to think on their feet and allows for some back and forth between them. He is pushing the party hard for a change that Ms. Clark would likely only embrace reluctantly.
She has more to lose than gain with any concept in which she has less control over the outcome.
With so much at stake, it's hard to imagine that we've seen the last of the kind of nasty campaign tactics we've witnessed already.
Gary Mason