Let's take a look at the currents swirling inside the UCP leadership race

This column is an opinion from Graham Thomson, an award-winning journalist who has covered Alberta politics for more than 30 years. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

Premier Danielle Smith.

Get used to it. That appears to be where we're headed after watching the first official leadership debate Wednesday evening in Alberta's United Conservative Party race to replace Premier Jason Kenney.

There might be seven people on the track but Smith seems to be the only one with a steering wheel — and she's leading everybody in circles with no off ramp.

She is setting the agenda and the rest are eating her dust.

This doesn't necessarily mean she will win the race that will grind along until Oct. 6, but the debate laid bare, in very subtle ways, how the race is shaping up.

Pretty much every candidate attacked Smith at some point — because they see her as the front-runner that must be stopped.

In response, Smith took shots at her opponents but in her closing remarks made a point of praising all of them individually — because she sees herself as the front-runner who might need to rely on some of them for support in the final vote on Oct. 6.

The UCP leadership race to replace Jason Kenney as party leader — and also premier — is a complicated affair that largely runs beneath the surface as the seven candidates compete to sign up new members while trying to sway existing members.

It is not, like general elections, a first-past-the-post system where the person with the most votes, compared to the others, wins.

In the UCP race, the winner must have a majority. That's why the party is using a preferential ballot system where members rank each candidate from their first choice to their last choice on the ballot.

If no candidate wins a majority in the first count, the last place candidate is dropped and all of his or her ballots are examined for the second choice. Then those ballots are redistributed among the surviving candidates according to the second choice. The process is repeated until one candidate wins a majority.

That's why candidates who see themselves as front-runners won't attack those perceived to be also-rans for fear of alienating their supporters.

It's why, for example, during the debate nobody was needling MLA Leela Aheer whose logical, decent, science-based campaign is not exactly setting the province abuzz. They might need her later.