I was involved in the campaign and think that the Wildrose did rather well. Absolutely, they would have liked to do better but they took on a huge entrenched party and put up some pretty respectable numbers. Four years from now they will have the opportunity to run again and this time with a record of both experience in the legislature and experience running a campaign.
Remember that half of the PC candidates were up for reelection which means that they already had a team in place to run their campaign and they knew what they were getting into. Those experienced candidates were able to help out the junior ones and even the junior ones had existing boards to help them out.
One of the campaigns that I helped out on was Kelly Hudson in Dunvegan. He was nominated to run in the weeks leading up to the campaign. At that point he had no money in the CA bank, no campaign material and only a few volunteers to help him out. He ended up taking 42% of the vote. He lost, but that is still a huge success for a first time candidate and would have been enough to win in most elections. In four more years he will be far more prepared. In comparison the established Liberal party received less than 3% of the vote and the NDP whom the riding is named after managed to get 10%.
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