After 16 years of B.C. Liberal government, it's easy to see why some might already be counting out B.C. NDP Leader John Horgan.

He has a few strikes against him. His party can't even come close to matching the B.C. Liberals in raising money.

The B.C. Liberal premier, Christy Clark, gets 10 times as much media coverage as Horgan.

And in a fiscally conservative province, Clark's B.C. Liberals have consistently balanced the operating budget.

Moreover, Clark can leverage the power of incumbency to make her government look good when the Evergreen Line opens next month in Coquitlam, which is home to two swing seats.

She can also pick the right time to announce a new rapid-transit project in Surrey, boosting the B.C. Liberals' prospects south of the Fraser River.

And her plan to build a bridge to replace the George Massey Tunnel could help the B.C. Liberals finally recapture Delta South after twice losing to independent MLA Vicki Huntington.

Despite this, it's still too early to write off Horgan and the B.C. NDP.

First off, elections are usually a referendum on the party in power. If the public doesn't like the governing party, it will often settle on the best alternative to get rid of it. We saw that in the 2015 federal election when the public coalesced around the Liberals to throw out Stephen Harper and the Conservatives.

Secondly, in the social media world, political insurgents can accomplish a great deal even if they lack the financial resources of their competitors.

Thirdly, the rough-and-tumble Horgan is likely far more appealing than his predecessor, the bookish Adrian Dix, in places like Williams Lake, Kamloops, and Prince George.

The B.C. NDP has won three provincial elections since 1972 and in each case, it never obtained even 41 percent of the vote. Its success was rooted in the anti-NDP vote splitting among different parties.

That can only happen if a significant number of traditional B.C. Liberal voters decide they've had enough of Clark as premier.

Even if these citizens don't vote NDP, they can still deprive the B.C. Liberals of a majority if enough of them cast ballots for Green or B.C. Conservative candidates.

So what's likely to push them in this direction?

In 2013, one of Clark's strengths was that she was seen by some as an insurgent candidate, even though she was the premier. Most of her caucus backed another leadership candidate, Kevin Falcon. Clark painted herself as an outsider, almost like the anti-Gordon Campbell of provincial politics.

Clark also made wild promises about how liquefied natural gas would leave B.C. debt-free. Her ad experts crafted outstanding television spots making her look like a smart neighbour sitting around the table talking common sense about the economy. In some respects, Clark was an ideal candidate for people in the outer suburbs and the 250 area code to send a message to the media elites and pollsters who had crowned Dix premier before the campaign even started.

But an odd thing happened over the past three-and-a-half years. Clark has morphed from being a political outsider wearing a hard hat to a bona fide member of the establishment. These days, the premier is looking a lot more like Hillary Clinton than the damn-the-torpedoes risk taker of 2013.

Clark has hobnobbed with the rich and famous, including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. She travels with a taxpayer-financed photographer. She even collects an extra $50,000 per year moonlighting for her party on top of her generous provincial salary as premier. All of this smacks of elitism.

While Clark can try to re-create the role of being on the people's side in the 2017 election, it's going to wear a little thin in light of how she's conducted herself in the top job. The only time she really acted outside of the box and appeared to take a risk was when she introduced a 15 percent tax on foreign home buyers.

This establishment premier creates an opportunity not only for Horgan, but also for the B.C. Green party. It tends to attract votes from those who mistrust political insiders, though leader Andrew Weaver seems to be trying to take his party into the mainstream.

There's no shortage of policies for the B.C. NDP or the Greens to exploit. This includes the premier's seeming willingness to do a deal with another member of the establishment, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to make the Kinder Morgan pipeline a reality.

Clark is also politically vulnerable for supporting the Site C dam in the absence of an independent review by the provincial energy regulator, the B.C. Utilities Commission. And her LNG proposals, not to mention the plan to replace the George Massey Tunnel, both carry huge risks for voters who want a reduction, rather than a sharp increase, in provincial greenhouse gas emissions.

Today in a speech in downtown Vancouver, Horgan also played up the B.C. Liberal government's shortcomings around education.

While it might seem a long shot today that the B.C. NDP can win the next election, far stranger things have happened in B.C. politics.

Just look back to 1972 when a chubby former social worker named Dave Barrett led the party to an unexpected majority. It came one election after another bookish former NDP leader, Tom Berger, lost an election that his party was supposed to win.

By 1972, the prevailing political wisdom was that the B.C. NDP would never win. Barrett proved the experts wrong. It's not out of the question that in 2017, Horgan just might do it again.