Is a ‘safe’ bet always a sound choice?

John Duffy is a founding principal at StrategyCorp. He has participated directly in seven national and provincial Liberal leadership campaigns.

Every Canadian leadership race has insider and outsider candidates. It's one of the defining features of a selection dynamic, as the party's voters are bombarded with subtle signals aimed at stimulating the disgruntled into supporting an outsider, or rallying the incumbent crowd to defend their hold on the party.

This question of whether the party should stay under existing management is usually mapped against the broader issue of electability. For the bulk of voters, two questions become a single algorithm: can we win the next election with this candidate and this version of the party, or do we need a different version and the candidate that goes with it, and how does that work out for me, my people and the ideas I care about?

The pundits' postvote consensus is clear and accurate: Andrew Scheer was the "safe choice," the insider, the candidate of continuity. He ran as Bush the Elder to Mr. Harper's Ronald Reagan – the well-groomed heir to the revered father of the revolution, but with a "kinder, gentler" touch. Another white-male Prairie MP, just like the founding helmsman.

All this was beautifully summed up, and dutifully picked up by media, in Mr. Scheer's depiction of himself as "Stephen Harper with a smile." His support was disproportionately strong in the incumbent corridors of Tory power: amongst MPs and key elements of the Harper PMO crowd. That, plus the party's phalanx of right-to-lifers (who were always solidly with Harper) and the economic moderates, pushed socially conservative and economically liberal-ish Mr. Scheer past the socially liberal and economically neo-conservative outsider, Maxime Bernier.

So in choosing Mr. Scheer, the party has voted – albeit by the narrowest of margins – to maintain its configuration under current management. Two highly relevant questions arise: first, will Mr. Scheer have the skill to keep the losing outsiders happy and motivated? Second, is that enough to win an election?

To address the first, there's got to be an awful lot of Conservatives – 47 per cent of individuals voting – who wanted to shake things up and were thwarted by last Saturday's result. Existing management held the line, but barely. So who wanted change, and why?

The free-marketers stand out here. Various factions in the CPC, such as the pro-life wing or the xenophobes, get more attention. A frequently overlooked but more numerous grouping is the neo-conservative, Reagan-Thatcher-Paul Ryan crowd: thoughtful, Hayek-quoting, Chicago School apostles of efficient markets and rational consumer choice.

These folks were uncomfortable with many of the compromises that Mr. Harper in power made on these issues, even the pivots that were forced upon him by overwhelming events such as the 2008 global financial collapse. This time, in opposition, the free-market warriors gathered behind Mr. Bernier, and in force: 30 per cent of the top-choice support. That's a pretty big chunk of the party.

The social conservatives seem happy with Mr. Scheer. So do the economic moderates, who rallied behind him down-ballot. The xenophobes made more noise than impact. So it's the neo-cons Mr. Scheer will have to reach out to. The new leader may have succeeded in scuppering their chances thanks to Quebec's dairy lobby, Red Tories and other defenders of less market-oriented policies. But he will face some tough sledding if he tries to keep Mr. Bernier's large, pro-market wing onside merely with recycled promises of deficit control.

In the famously factional history of the Conservatives, Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark had to deal with the Diefenbaker-era "cowboys," Brian Mulroney battled to keep his Westerners and Québécois on the same page, and Mr. Harper ceaselessly toiled to keep the more eccentric elements of the Reform Party from derailing his attempts to offer a national government to Canadians. Mr. Scheer seems fated to face a similar challenge with a very large rump of disappointed neo-conservatives.

Then there's the electorate. Even if Mr. Scheer and his more-of-the-same incumbent team can unite the fractious Tories, he faces an electorate that has, in many ways, moved on. Mr. Scheer's version of the CPC – down to a number of the key people on his team – are the folks who delivered 5.8 million votes to their cause in 2011, and in 2015 … 5.6 million.

The big difference between the two elections, as I argued a year-and-a-half ago in these pages, was in voter turnout. Voting zoomed from 14.8 million in 2011 to 17.5 million in 2015, with most of the new vote almost certainly going to the Liberals from new, younger participants as well as a bump in turnout amongst First Nations and Muslim Canadians. In effect, the Harper-Scheer party landed the same number of fish in the two elections, but the pond had gotten a lot bigger, leaving them missing the boat with millennials and others.

Is putting a smile on the Stephen Harper party enough to make it competitive amongst younger, more urban voters? Or will the Scheer strategy be mainly to hope Mr. Trudeau's first-time voters return to their prior apathy and stay at home? Can Mr. Scheer do this while taming his neo-conservative free-marketers? Can he keep his social conservatives out of the spotlight? And will Mr. Scheer benefit from a measure of resurgence by the NDP?

All of these, in some measure, will probably be needed for the supposed "safe choice" of Mr. Scheer to turn into a sound, winning one for the Conservatives.