One of the UCP candidates for the Lesser Slave Lake nomination asked the other day what our sense was of who had the inside track in the race. Of course we had no idea. For starters, only UCP members get to vote, and they are not wearing identification badges. We’ve done no polls, and even in coffee shop conversation the topic doesn’t often come up.

So no, we don’t have a clue. Sometimes in a general election you can get a sense of the way things are going. But usually not.

Only one time did we (at The Leader) attempt some actual opinion polling. That was back in the early 1990s, the federal election where Dave Chatters of the Reform Party unseated Jack Shields of the PCs. Two reporters stayed after work one evening and made 30 or 40 phone calls apiece. Based on the results of that survey, we were able to correctly predict a Chatters victory, for what that was worth.

No such survey will be done for the UCP nomination race. Good luck to all involved, though, which at this point appears to be (in reverse alphabetic order, for a change) Silas Yellowknee, Scott Sinclair, Jerrad Cunningham and Martine Carifelle.