PETER MacKAY

Strength: Frontrunner status

Weakness: The social conservative vote

MacKay entered this race as the frontrunner. He has the best name recognition, performs well in public polling, racked up the most Conservative caucus endorsements, and raised a lot of money early on. But his fundraising advantage has since vanished, and most party insiders think the race has tightened up between MacKay, O'Toole and Lewis.

With his home base in Nova Scotia, MacKay is bound to run up big victories in Atlantic Canada. He's also expected to do well in the Greater Toronto Area. But Quebec, Western Canada and the rest of Ontario are more of a battleground, and MacKay will need a strong showing in these areas to pull away from the pack. It's no surprise that his campaign manager Alex Nuttall was tweeting from Montreal recently, where he's working on getting out the vote.

The problem for MacKay is that the dynamics of the ranked ballot work against him. Two of the four candidates — Lewis and Sloan — are supported by social conservatives, and all indications are that those voters are unlikely to rank MacKay above O'Toole for their second choice. They will, for example, remember MacKay's comment from the fall that Scheer's election downfall was caused by the “stinking albatross” of social conservative issues.

However, it's also quite possible that social conservative voters only put Sloan and Lewis on their ballots, and nobody else. If that happens, and Sloan and Lewis are eliminated, those votes simply disappear in later rounds and the vote share of the remaining candidates are inflated, which helps the frontrunner. This is why trying to predict the ranked ballot is so difficult.

Assuming MacKay doesn't have enough support to win outright on the first ballot, he has two paths to victory: The first is that he establishes a big-enough lead in the first round that he can withstand losing vote share in subsequent rounds. This path will also depend on the social conservative vote mostly disappearing if Sloan and Lewis are eliminated, instead of second-choice votes flowing to O'Toole. If that happens, MacKay could start out with a lead and just never give it up.

The second path to victory for MacKay involves O'Toole finishing in third place, behind Lewis. If that happens, many of O'Toole's voters could have MacKay ranked next on their ballot. It's possible that some O'Toole voters are anti-MacKay enough that they'll leave MacKay entirely off their ballot or rank him last. But most campaign organizers think O'Toole's second-choice votes will largely go to MacKay, rather than Lewis.

The bottom line is that if the race is close, MacKay's best hope is to have Lewis finish ahead of O'Toole and then hoover up O'Toole's voters once he drops off the ballot.