Open thread on the ALP leadership race – I will update once I see some results. Rest assured, you will get results here, long before CNN has them!

UPDATE: The hotly contested David versus David ALP leadership race has ended with David Swann emerging as the winner on the first ballot.

David Swann – 2,468 (54%)
Dave Taylor – 1,616 (35%)
Mo Elsalhy – 491 (11%)

This comes as a bit of a surprise, as everyone expected the race to be a lot closer than this, and most people I’d talked to thought Taylor’s well run campaign would give him a ground game advantage. In the end, it appears that Swann managed to bring a lot of new faces into the party and that they were simply more motivated to vote.

While I would have voted for Taylor myself were I still living in Alberta, I’ve always had immense respect for David Swann as a person. As I said in my profile of him, you will never find a more genuine individual, politician or not. Although I have a lot of doubts about his electability in a right-of-centre province, I have nothing but the best of wishes for David, and I think he would make a fantastic Premier.

So what does it all mean?

I will say that a Swann victory is certainly more intriguing than a Taylor one would have been. Swann has been far more radical in his talk about working with the other opposition parties and of renaming the Alberta Liberal Party. He is probably the least conventional politician leading a major political party (using the term loosely) in Canada right now, so it’s really hard to predict how he’ll fare. But given the current predictability of Alberta politics and that province’s history of Black Swan elections, a little unpredictability might not be a bad thing.