The Gist: No contest

There are, perhaps, alternative worlds where lots of things are different. Fianna Fáil maybe decide to run an MEP instead of a MIA. Or one where a fleet of no-hopers got nominated and we spent the whole campaign having to listen to the media asking candidates their opinions on the Latin mass and if cocaine bloat is a positive feature in a President.

But, writing as the Presidential election results that literally everyone expected come in from the count centres, there is one thing we can be pretty sure of. In all of the possible universes, there was never one where Heather Humphreys was going to win a Presidential contest against Catherine Connolly.

And we know that for sure, because we've just tried it out.

Catherine Connolly will be declared as the next President of Ireland by the end of the day.

So let's take this chance to think about what just happened.

Catherine Connolly: What do I know?

Back at the start of these Gists I said that Catherine Connolly was having a mare of a campaign. This, of course, was because I am an idiot. And, in this case, I was a particularly shameful kind of idiot. Like the most flabby-minded middle aged golf bore at the end of the club bar, I mistook my media diet for reality. Shame on me.

In actual fact, what was happening was that she was gradually building a grassroots campaign, recognised and supported in turn by each of the parties who joined the initial Social Democrats nucleus. She was doing this by actually going and talking to human beings, either directly through an endless national tour that would put Bob Dylan to shame or by speaking through social media directly into people's ears and from their pockets through videos, podcasts and groupchats.

She did this in the face of an absurdly hostile institutional print media running a series of narratives completely unrelated to anything happening on the ground. We'll come back to that later on.

In each of those conversations she was herself and nobody else. What was clear to everyone watching was that she was probably incapable of being a political mouthpiece for anyone else. And, as they met her, listened to her, saw her keepy-uppy skills and thought about her ability to remain herself while staying within the roles she took on (Leas Ceann Comhairle, barrister, TD) they decided that she was a person who matched the role of President, as they wanted it to be.

I don't think that 65-70% of the Irish electorate now agree with her every position. I do think they decided she was the right person for this job.

Fine Gael: What was all of that about?

In a way, it seems misleading to talk about a single Fine Gael campaign, because they ran a number of conflicting campaigns at the same time. There was one where "Heather" offered to serve tray bakes to the nation in a feel good, Aga-warmed, retirement Presidency. We had a different one where the Humphreys campaign consistently let the losing candidate self-soothe by making visits within a drive of her house in the North-West and make FG Chamber of Commerce-style speeches about small businesses and exports. In Fine Gael, this is the equivilent of chanting a Buddhist mantra to calm the mind. This is also how to appeal to the voters she knew and understood, in Cavan-Monaghan. Unfortunately, nobody in her camp seemed to have noticed that she wasn't running for President of Cavan-Monaghan.

Both these campaigns, while incompatible and incoherent, could plausibly be represented as an expression of different parts of who Humphreys presented herself as, as a candidate.

But, once the IPSOS Irish Times poll came out and Jim Gavin performed his rare landlord self-Maoing, a third Fine Gael campaign appeared. This one was the 'smear the bejasus' effort of a losing team and had every appearance of being run from Fine Gael HQ, without reference to the candidate at all. At one point, it put out an actual attack video and sent links to the media to try to get them to embarrass themselves by asking stupid questions about whether barristers are the same as their clients really. When Humphreys was asked about it on air, she didn't even know what video they were talking about.

The institutional media, of course, were happy to be fed something to say, spending two days talking amongst themselves about the cab-rank rule. This, from what we might term The Harris Campaign must have felt like a huge win. And it was worth precisely Nothing in getting votes for their candidate.

What we learned from the General Election was that Simon Harris had no idea what a successful campaign actually is, because he thinks success is a series of images or headlines obtained that add up to a win.

So he stages handshakes or ice cream cone lickings or says empty attack lines that get repeated ad nauseum but never stops to tell voters what any of it is actually all for. The important message in an election isn't 'Vote For Me' but ' Vote For Me so I can change [Insert Campaign Theme Here]'.

This is particularly baffling to Fine Gael, because their perennial political offering is to make sure that nothing actually changes, ever.

The Heather Humphreys campaign was doomed from the start because she was a candidate who offered to be a spokesperson for a minority (Fine Gaelers) while running for the one office in the state where being seen as a party partisan representative is poison. The President isn't meant to do what they're told. They have to know their own minds, so as to act independently in the small but critical areas where they have direct powers. They also need to use that mind to reflect wider society's values. The Humphrey's campaign demonstrated time and again that it didn't recognise the legitimacy of any non-FG values. It also had trouble showing us that Heather Humphreys had thought about any of these things.

None of the attack lines floated by the various Humphreys' campaigns landed because they weren't about anything voters cared about. We've spoken before about the Fine Gael approach to political messaging as a squash game, where their prepackaged lines are smashed repeatedly against the uncaring wall of the electorate. They tried some old nonsense about the Cab rank rules, about hiring a policy assistant who had been in prison and even tried to terrorise us with a good time by resurrecting the old Cumann na nGaedheal Red Scare lines from the 1930s.

None of it was about how people live, or want to see the country they live in reflected by the office of President, granted the huge moral authority of being elected with the single largest political mandate of any official in the state.

Spoiled Brats

The final story of the election, and one that has come into focus as the count goes on, has been the elevated level of spoiled votes. This is an invitation for Ireland's Greatest Losers to claim that, actually, every spoiled vote is a vote for whatever voter-repellent position they want to push.

It is undeniable that a two candidate race is anathema to the modern Irish political desires. Voters are used to having a range of choices and being able to make nuanced sub-choices between them with transfers. This election became a de facto experiment with a First Past The Post election and a major bloc of the electorate didn't like either of their real choices (or the human Rich Tea biscuit in the middle of the ballot). But trying to read votes covered in overt racism and ones that wrote-in Elvis Presley as making the same political point is simply not a credible narrative. And it shouldn't be given any credibility just because the people who want to make it do so standing on top of their very large handbags.

Everyone loves a winner

The price of this election may come due for some of the losing parties sooner than they imagine.

But for today, we can look forward to the declaration of the nation's 10th President in Dublin Castle being a positive, joyous and popular one.