If the Conservatives win in Ontario next month, as they might, it will be in spite of themselves. At least, this is what the polls indicate.

The numbers have the Tories closing up to the Grits as the election campaign begins -- officially, that is, because unofficially it has been under way for some time -- yet on a major election issue, faith-based school funding, most voters support the Liberal position. No wonder Ontario's Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty wants to make it the election issue.

The question is, why is Tory leader John Tory helping him? He, too, is playing up the issue of funding religious schools. I can understand anyone not wanting to be the premier of Ontario -- heck, I'd sooner dig ditches (I did once and hated it) -- but not being premier can easily be achieved by not running. This way, Tory may be saddled with the job, plus the silly policy he espouses.

For using public money to fund parochial schools is silly. Funding several religions is more equitable than funding only one, but not a whit smarter. You don't get from silly to smart by multiplication. The formula isn't S(illy) X 3 = S(mart.) If funding Catholic schools is silly, extending funding to Jewish and Muslim schools makes it silly times three.

I understand parents who wish to raise their children free of the baneful influence of Ontario's state religion, Evangelical Left-Liberalism (as the commentator Alastair Gordon calls it), but the solution is tax cuts and private (or home) schooling, not dipping into each other's pockets for subsidies.

A politician won't make the Guinness Book of Records for breaking an election promise, but the Conservative leader is the carry-out type. That is why one needs to pay close attention to what he says. His opponents are, shall we say, more flexible -- but if Tory promises to do the wrong thing, you can probably take it to the bank.

Faith-based school funding seems the wrong thing to most Ontarians responding to the latest Ipsos Reid poll. Yet -- and here's the paradox -- the same voters are still narrowing the gap between the leading Grits and trailing Tories. Don't these Ontarians realize that they're being inconsistent? Or don't they care?

I think they don't care. In stable, prosperous democracies such as Ontario, governments change mainly when a narrow band of uncommitted or "swing" voters decide after a couple of terms or so to give the other guys a chance. Policies and personalities do matter, but they weigh less in the scales than the increasing urge of swing voters for a change after any party has been in power for a while.

And the Liberals may, just may, have had their run in Ontario.

What about core voters? They're the opposite. Core voters -- "the base" -- seem to be as faithful as storks. A core Conservative or Liberal will always vote Conservative or Liberal, and what's more, he or she may be hard-wired to do so.

The link between political affiliation and certain personality traits has long been suggested -- some would say established -- by students of behaviour. Conservatives prefer absolutes and consistency; liberals tolerate complexities and ambiguities. A study published in the British journal Nature Neuroscience even posited the heritability of a correlation between political views and so-called "cognitive style" (no great news to novelists, gossip columnist, police investigators, and other observers of human beings). And one New York University study released this week suggests that the brains of liberals and conservatives react differently to the same stimuli.

The researchers used electroencephalographs to measure neuronal impulses in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain linked with the self-regulatory process of conflict monitoring. News reports say the match-up was unmistakable: "Respondents who had described themselves as liberals showed 'significantly greater conflict-related neural activity' when the hypothetical situation called for an unscheduled break in routine."

Oh boy. What if we're hard wired, not just as liberals and conservatives, but as "core" and "swing" voters as well? Suppose New York University's David Amodio and his colleagues are right, and suppose pollsters are reading the tea leaves accurately.

In that case, barring some scandal, Ontario's core conservatives and liberals will reflexively vote Conservative and Liberal on Oct. 10, while swing voters will support the party to which their pendulum-like orbit happens to take them. And issues like faith-based school funding that so exercise politicians, pressure groups, and pundits like me, will count for very little.

George Jonas writes for the National Post.