James Campbell: As polling day looms, election still undecided
With eight days to go it is looking increasingly likely this election will be decided in the second half of next week. Both sides agree if polling day were tomorrow Labor would win but there are still a huge number of undecided voters, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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With eight days to go it is looking increasingly likely this election will be decided in the second half of next week.
Both sides agree if polling day were tomorrow Labor would win — but not by that much.
Newspoll has the government closing on Labor but at 38 per cent, its primary vote is too low to win.
What everyone agrees is that there are still a huge number of undecided voters.
CITIZENSHIP CLOUD OVER LIBERAL MP
If last year’s Victorian election is a guide, at this point trying to work out how they will jump is probably better way of how things are going to turn out than looking at opinion polls.
In the second last week of that campaign Liberal tracking polls were improving.
They peaked over the last weekend before going into sharp reverse as the weight of Labor’s ad buy kicked in, such that by the last Friday the party leadership knew they were cooked.
At the NSW election in March something similar happened.
The ALP leader Michael Daley had run a small target strategy based around money being wasted on stadiums.
This meant that after it was derailed by his remarks about Asian migrants in the last week he had nothing to talk about just as voters were tuning in.
Federal Labor is determined not to make that mistake.
It has put bold policies out there and put them out early allowing the government time to attack them.
It is even bringing the release of its costings forward a week to allow government attacks to wash through the news cycle over the weekend.
The aim is to clear the decks to allow for a final push in the last 48 hours when recent history suggests people make up their minds.
If it succeeds it will be considered genius. But if it fails …
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