Why I think the conventional media and the pollsters bet on the wrong horse in this Alberta provincial election of April 23, 2013.

Most were forecasting a majority Wild Rose government, the new Wild Rose party taking at least 44 of the 87 ridings up for grab.

The actual results: Progressive Conservatives, 61; Wild Rose, 17; Liberals, 5; New Democrats 4.

Do you remember when Premier Alison Redford won the Conservative Leadership race with an astounding come-from-beyond sprint, from 17% of the party vote to over 50% in the final ballot two weeks later?

Do you remember how she won, by mobilizing medical and education professionals through unconventional means (i.e. the social media) that was most effective, but very difficult to quantify. Do you remember that nobody, but nobody, predicted she could possibly win?

Let's go back to October of 2010, when now-Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi emerged out of a flock of mayoralty candidates to win when he wasn't even a front-runner.

Let us remember Stephen Carter was Nenshi's campaign manager, was Alison Redford's leadership campaign manager, and was the deputy campaign manager for Monday's Conservative Miracle By The High Level Bridge.

Carter and his team have learned to mobilize crucial chunks of voters through social media, and so far, the conventional media and the pollsters haven't figured this out.

My 18- and 21-year-old daughters were commenting on this phenomenon for the five days leading up to the election. Their Facebook accounts were full of the same message, from friends their own age. Wild Rose, bad, bad, bad, reactionary and old-fashioned, not good for us. Don't waste your vote, Alison Redford is our friend, vote for the Progressive Conservative party. I don't know for sure how they voted (that's their business) but I bet it was PC.

These kids don't have land-phone lines being blasted by political robo-calls. They don't talk to pollsters. But when it came time to vote, there had to be thousands and thousands of new young voters (not identified by the pollsters or the political reporters) who voted PC.

It truly helped when those two Wild Rose candidates talked of homosexuals burning in hell and glad to be white - in retrospect, Danielle Smith should have chucked them overboard immediately instead of apologizing for their "mistakes". Because the younger generation has completely embraced whatever aspect of sexuality an individual wishes to be, and at least half of the younger generation have some portion of blood coursing through their veins that did not originate in the European gene pool.

So in the last week, you had the wave of youth deciding to vote PC, you had all kinds of Edmontonians reacting to Wild Rose policies that were seen as anti-Edmonton, and in Calgary a reconsideration, that being Conservative wasn't so bad after all.

Plus thousands of voters who weren't especially anti-Wild Rose, but wanted to "test 'em out" in opposition first. Remember, Peter Lougheed was in opposition with six newly minted young, bright Conservatives for a term, before he swept to power.

For the record, at the start of April, end of March I was predicting a bare-majority Wild Rose Government. In the last two days leading up to April 23, I re-wrote my prediction to a bare-majority Conservative Government.