Where have all the Liberals gone? For more than a decade, Steeltown belonged solely and wholly to the federal Grits.

They held all five seats in the city and suburbs and maintained their absolute grip on power through three successive general elections.

Their point-to-pommel control crumbled and vanished in the 2006 election.

While nationally the natural governing party splashed down into opposition, locally it was submerged and drowned.

Now, two years later, without a single seat to their name, Hamilton Liberals are fighting an uphill battle to regain a toehold on turf that once gave birth to glittering cabinet stars such as John Munro and Sheila Copps.

How do you explain their humiliating nosedive?

More crucially for this election, can they make a comeback or has a pattern of failure and defeat taken hold?

The first question is the easiest to answer. No one thing humbled the mighty Hamilton Liberals.

They were casualties of a combination of circumstances that featured national scandals, self-inflicted wounds, complacency, riding re-distribution, and the uniting of the splintered right.

Neither their fall from favour nor their monopolistic rise happened overnight.

The Liberals first swept Hamilton in the 1993 election that gave us Jean Chretien as prime minister and saw the anti-Mulroney backlash reduce the Conservatives to two seats in Ottawa.

But even before their first of three sweeps, the Grits had already fielded a solid troupe of MPs here -- Copps, who inherited Hamilton East from Munro, Stan Keyes in Hamilton West, and Beth Phinney in Hamilton Mountain.

The 1993 wave added to the crew John Bryden in what is now the riding of Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale (ADFW) and Tony Valeri in the riding which later became Stoney Creek.

Over in Burlington, the same tide brought in Paddy Torsney, who was also washed out in 2006 and is now running to reclaim her seat.

This regional armada sailed almost effortlessly through elections in 1997 and again in 2000. But by 2004, they were taking on water.

Electoral boundary changes saw Copps and Valeri tearing each other and party unity apart in the nomination battle for the new riding of Hamilton East-Stoney Creek.

Their ugly struggle echoed the bitter internecine warfare between their respective patrons, Chretien and his successor Paul Martin.

Valeri won the nomination. Copps was sidelined. But some Liberals believe the wounds to the local party are still weeping.

Against this poisonous background, Keyes saw half his constituency disappear into the new riding of Hamilton Centre, where in 2004 he squared off against popular New Democrat Dave Christopherson.

Faced with the spillover from the Copps-Valeri feud, and a strong opponent for the first time in years, Keyes, who had finally cracked the ranks of cabinet, lost his seat after 16 years in power.

"There was just too much happening at the same time," Keyes recalls.

"Why vote for people who are fighting amongst each other?"

Party dissension also saw Bryden, always something of a maverick, defect to the Conservatives. Though newcomer Russ Powers hung onto ADFW for the Liberals, the united right was starting to make its presence felt.

While the Liberals were gnawing away at themselves, they had neglected to organize sufficiently in the new riding of Niagara West-Glanbrook, which fell to the new Conservatives, an amalgam of the old Tories and Canadian Alliance.

When the 2004 election fog lifted, three local Liberals were left standing in what was now a Martin minority government -- Valeri, Phinney, Powers.

By the time the 2006 election was fought and lost, the situation had deteriorated dramatically.

Phinney had retired and Valeri and Powers succumbed to a tsunami of resentment against Liberal entitlement and the Quebec sponsorship scandal, both symptoms of fat cats too long in power.

"There was a dissatisfaction with the way things were being operated by the Liberal party, locally and nationally,'" recalls lawyer Roger Yachetti, a longtime Liberal supporter.

"I have to be honest with you, even I became disaffected by their attitude."

Lawyer Milt Lewis, a storied Liberal organizer, agrees.

He thinks the sponsorship scandal cost Valeri and Powers their jobs and grievously hurt star candidate Bill Kelly.

"There was a sense that liberals couldn't be trusted," says Lewis.

Rightly or wrongly, some also believe the coup de grace was delivered by a series of Spectator stories about a Valeri land flip that ran during the campaign.

"I think the Tony Valeri situation very clearly impacted all of us," says Powers.

"It put a local face on a Quebec scandal, and I heard it at the door."

Regardless, Liberal power in Hamilton was broken.

As a result, the New Democrats now control the three inner city seats, the Conservatives the two suburban riding. The question is can the Grits make a comeback under a new leader with new faces in the lineup?

Yachetti for one thinks the party is still struggling locally.

"There's no question we're in disarray."

But he also thinks there's reason for hope. Like others, his best hope rests with former mayor Larry Di Ianni who's running in Hamilton East-Stoney Creek. Others look to Tyler Banham on Hamilton Mountain.

But as Keyes points out, federal races are normally not won by candidates. People vote for the leader first, the party second, the candidate third. If that holds true, given that the Liberals are led by the shaky Stephane Dion, local Grits might have to wait for the election after this one to come in from the cold.

Still, these are early days.

On the campaign trail, anything can happen.

"I sense that every single election is an independent chapter," says Lewis, "a story all by itself with its own storylines and explanations as to why you have a given result."

That not only helps explain where all the Liberals have gone, it may serve as a guide to where they're going.

Andrew Dreschel's commentary usually appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. adreschel@thespec.com 905-526-3495.