On test cases

There are plenty of questions floating around about what the Harper Cons can possibly think they're doing, whether by launching gratuitous partisan attacks in the least appropriate of venues or doubling down on a complete abandonment of reason on the gun registry. And it's true enough that those types of actions make very little sense from the standpoint of trying to gradually accumulate support toward a level that can win a majority.

But let's not forget that the Cons have seen their overall support stagnate or drop for the bulk of 2010: even when the Libs were collapsing in the spring and summer, the Cons seldom managed to move much past about 30-35% in the polls. And it's hard to see what they could possibly do over the next six months to a year (in which an election seems fairly likely) to substantially improve their underlying support base from an incremental building perspective.

With that in mind, the Cons' strategy at this point looks to be based almost entirely on trying to time an election with a temporary spike in support. And that impression is only reinforced by their coalition fearmongering, which is of course based on the theory that a temporary backlash (which dissipated in a matter of weeks even when based on real events rather than speculation) can be recreated to the Cons' advantage.

Meanwhile, the opposition parties don't seem to have much desire to force an election anytime soon. And that minimizes the potential downside for the Cons in taking some risks to test whether they can set up even a faintly plausible majority scenario this fall.

So one can fairly easily make sense of the Cons' brinksmanship by seeing it less in terms of an expectation of raising support, and more in terms of a shock intended to temporarily increase risk and variance levels in party support - with the upside of temporarily pulling an extra 5% of the vote into the Cons' corner to set up a snap election seen as worth both the risk of producing the opposite effect in the short term, and the damage done to the Cons' self-image of stability in the longer term.

But if that is the Cons' reasoning, then it only makes sense based on an admission that Harper's incremental strategy has failed, such that the Cons have little left to do but go for broke even if it means bleeding away soft support over time. And with the first couple of shocks earning the Cons nothing but criticism so far, we may not be far from the end of Harper's stay in power.