After every change of government, dismal polls become a staple for the political misery that is Opposition. But there are dismal polls – – essentially temporary bouts of opprobrium and uncertainty unleashed by the electorate on the recently vanquished — and then there are polls so dismal that one must start to question whether they represent some underlying shift afoot in the size and structure of a party’s base vote.
We’ve seen the latter in action before, particularly at the State level, with leaders like Peter Beattie applying some WD40 to rusted on Coalition voters and forever changing the political landscape as a consequence.
But what is happening to the Coalition and Brendan Nelson is unprecedented.
The problem here of course is trying to estimate what the Coalition’s base vote actually is, or rather was. With a number of state Labor governments of late carving out pretty extraordinary majorities, it appears that the proportion of the electorate that that will only ever vote for the Coalition over Labor at any level of government has been shrinking for a while. If we look at state and federal elections over the last decade and for each state take the lowest primary and two party preferred vote that the Coalition has received in an election, we’ll get a fairly good idea of just how big, in practice, that group of the electorate is that will always vote for the Coalition over Labor under any circumstance.
So for NSW, the lowest primary vote achieved by the Coalition was 33.7% in 1999. However, there was a large One Nation effect running through that election which distorts the picture, so if we look at the 2003 State election we find the Coalition received a 35% primary vote with a TPP of 43.8%. So we’ll use this as our NSW Coalition base vote figure. If we do the same for all the states and use federal results for Tasmania (because of their Hare-Clark system) while paying particular attention to avoiding any One Nation distortionary effects around 1998, we end up with the following lowest primary and two party preferred results received by the Coalition recently in major elections.
| NSW | VIC | QLD | WA | SA | TAS | |
| Primary | 35 | 38.2 | 35.5 | 34.4 | 36.1 | 37 |
| TPP | 43.8 | 42.2 | 44.5 | 47.3 | 43.2 | 42.7 |
We can then use state electoral population weights to get a national average of 36% for the Coalition primary vote base and 43.8% for the Coalition two-party preferred vote base, which represents the lowest possible level of Coalition support based on the actual putting of pen to ballot paper by the electorate. Our base vote estimate isn’t meant to compare State and Federal politics; it is simply an estimate of the proportion of the electorate that has never voted Labor over the Coalition in major elections — the truly rusted on Coalition vote.
If we run these two base vote lines against a seven year history of the federal Coalition primary and two party preferred vote estimates (using monthly Newspoll averages to knock out some of the size of the poll to poll noise), something extraordinary happens:
Now remember folks, this base vote is calculated on the sheer thumpings that the Coalition has received in the States of late, so it is probably a little undercooked in real life and would in reality probably be up to a couple of points higher than the red lines given here. Effectively, this is the Coalitions’ best base vote scenario.
Brendan Nelson is leading a party that is receiving a national vote share lower than all of the state Opposition annihilations of late put together. It makes the polling bleakness of early 2001, and that of March/April 2007 look like a golden age of popularity by comparison.
If that’s not bad enough, if we look at the way those State annihilations of the Opposition played out in practice, a sort of electoral hysteresis was operating. State ALP governments eroded the State Coalition vote to the point where the Coalition base started contracting, leading to an almost natural, lower long-term level of Coalition electoral support as a result — a level of support from which the state Oppositions have found it almost impossible to recover from, consigning themselves to a generation of political failure.
If you lose your base, you lose your political viability. The Nelson Opposition is losing their base vote in an unprecedented fashion.
Phil, I accept your point that a strongly performing Opposition leader is essential to take government but it is not the most important factor. A government that is stale, floundering and out of touch as the last government was is ripe for the taking. I think this government has enough good ideas and energy to sustain itself for a long time to come. It is also showing that its political management and projection skills are also strong and likely to maintain electoral support for an extended period. My predictions may well be wrong but the available evidence suggest they are in the right ballpark. Even most Liberals would feel “in their waters”, as Kath might, say that Rudd and Labor are unlikely to be beaten in the next two elections.
David M – what do I expect?
Not much – but they cannot afford to lose their base.The last 2 Oppositions that lost their base were Qld and NSW and looked what has happened as a result. In Qld they’ve turned into a bunch of political misfits whose predicament is so disasterous that they think that some Pineapple Party can only be an improvement, and the NSW Opposition has delivered the state a terrible government for the simple reason that the opposition is even worse.
This sort of analysis will no doubt push Tony Abbott and others to emerge from their depression and move against Nelson sooner rather than later but the fact is that Turnbull too has turned out to be a disappointment too, and is not looking like a strong alternative. He appears to lack conviction about anything in particular and is instead trying to pull off stunts that seem to be impressing nobody. For example, his attempts to deny that their is an inflation problem but we might get one because Swan keeps talking about it has been greeted with the stunned disbelief that it deserves. It looks like it is going to be a long time before the Liberals regain any sense of coherence and in the meantime Rudd will be so far down the path of reform, with the electorate enjoying the benefits of better schools, hospitals, infrastructure, governance generally, that they will most likely want to see Rudd finish the job. The Liberals will be left languishing, eating dust., for a decade or more.
Well said to David M, Possum! The conservatives have emerged as wet lettuce, immature, sulking fops with a prime example as its leader. At do or die time they drag out an ageing James Dean look-alike while they decide whether to regroup, re-build or retire. They do this every time the toss doesn’t go their way and the electorate is sick of petulance and lame-duck responses. Facts of life: Kev and his Sallies band are the breath of fresh air we all needed and there is no right-to-rule. In a balanced political system parties come and go from office. The inherent problem with the Liberals is they want all or nothing and that’s why in the now world of essential compromise, they’ve become irrelevant. In more ways then one, they need to find the middle ground.
talk for the sake of talk…..they only just lost the election….what do you expect by now?