[CaptainCrunch]

I think if there was one area that Smith's inexperience really showed is her understanding of the press, either she didn't calculate that the press would find resonates in her two candidates or she wasn't willing to do one of two things.

1) fight fire with fire and dig up the quote from Morton about his anti gay marriage stance and desire to fight against the issue

2) Her last speech on the issue where she took issue with her party being labeled as antigay and racist was never pushed hard on the press outside of the Sun which reprinted the speech in its entirety.

We can talk about the fear based campaigning once again, but I don't believe that Wildrose took it to the personal level that Raj and Allison did. To me Raj twitter extoring homophobes and racists to vote for and rally around Wildrose was fairly disgusting. Allison fell back on the whole hidden agenda campaign. While Wildrose did do some fear campaigning it was more based around the PC's economic platform which to me is a fairly legitimate target.

Danielle Smith should have fought harder on the homophobe and racist painting of her party, she should have both used the press better and not been so liberal in her forgiveness of her candidates.

In the next election she is certainly going to have to be more selective in her candidates, it was a lesson that Stephen Harper learned the hard way and it delayed his accession to power by at least an election.

There were some harsh lessons learned in this election by Smith that she's going to have 4 years to mull over. Her dealings with the press and social media being a big one, her candidate control being a big one, and maybe finding and storing some ammo if this issue comes up again. Its not good enough anymore to state multiple times that contentious issues such as gay rights are not on her agenda if she's being attacked on that level, she should have plainly stated that the PC party for example had multiple members on the fringe and they never used their time in power to make basic consititutional changes.

On the other note, it sounds like there were still 50% or less voter turnout again, I really don't know what's needed to get these people off of their couches to vote, I thought this was such a crucial and interesting election and yet half of the people in this province didn't practice their right to vote, I find that depressing.