After a seven-month leadership contest, the Alberta Liberals will announce their new leader on Dec. 13.

Dave Taylor, David Swann, and Mo Elsalhy, the three candidates running to replace outgoing leader and Edmonton-Riverview MLA Kevin Taft, barely raised enough public excitement to sell 2,000 new party memberships, putting the total amount of Albertans holding provincial Liberal memberships cards at around 6,000.

That’s a far cry from the 2006 Progressive Conservative leadership contest to replace Ralph Klein that saw candidates of the likes of Jim Dinning, Ted Morton, and Ed Stelmach sell over 100,000 memberships across the province.

To be fair, running for the leadership of a party that will celebrate 40 years in power at the next election is a far cry from running to lead a party that has called the opposition benches home for more than 80 years. And even with only 6,000 card-carrying members and little media fanfare, Alberta’s Liberal Party has come a long way from its leadership races of the past. Here’s a quick history lesson.

1993: After spending nearly a decade as the third party in the legislature (behind the then-official Opposition New Democrats), the Liberals reached the height of their support in the 1993 election under the leadership of former Edmonton mayor Laurence Decore.

1994: Following Decore’s defeat to Ralph Klein, the Liberals moved quickly to seek a replacement leader. In the 1994 contest to replace Decore, Liberal MLAs Grant Mitchell, Sine Chadi, Adam Germain, and Gary Dickson lined up their runs to lead the Opposition. Veteran MLA Mitchell was elected on the second ballot, but only after a very public fiasco that raised questions about proxy-voting and the reliability of the telephone voting system used in that contest. The phone-voting fiasco damaged the Liberals and dogged Mitchell into the 1997 election.

1997: The Mitchell-led Liberals lost ground to Klein’s Progressive Conservatives in the 1997 election, but the Liberal’s defining moment occurred while staging a semi-rebranding of the party by bringing in new candidates to replace departing Decore-era MLAs. The new faces, which included current Edmonton city councillors Linda Sloan and Ed Gibbons, helped position the Liberal Party not as the Decore-led slash-and-burn debt-and-deficit hawks, but as vocal opponents of the Klein cuts that shaped Alberta politics in the 1990s.

1998: When Mitchell retired from provincial politics, former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister and leadership candidate Nancy MacBeth defeated MLAs Ken Nicol, Karen Leibovici, and Linda Sloan in the leadership contest and took over of the reins of Opposition. None of MacBeth’s perceived potential was realized when the new leader faced Klein in the 2001 provincial election. Liberal bench-strength was reduced by retirements and defeats (including MacBeth and many of the party’s stronger MLAs, such as Leibovici and Howard Sapers).

2001: The 2001 election deflated the Liberals even further. Leaving a crippled party with seven MLAs, a devastated organization, and million-dollar debt, a seatless MacBeth resigned less than a week after the election, leaving the soft-spoken Nicol in command of not a damaged battleship, but a barely floating lifeboat. Taft replaced him only months before the 2004 election.