Election 2025: Higher churn of votes may see seat swapping between parties

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, left, and Anthony Albanese face off in the third leaders debate in Sydney on Tuesday. Picture: James Brickwood

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Labor’s entire political strategy is now solely built around Peter Dutton being unelectable.

And because the Coalition has failed to position the Liberal leader’s authenticity until now, this tactic appears to be biting.

Or at least Labor thinks it is.

Dutton instead has been left to do the heavy lifting on this front, as Wednesday night’s debate revealed.

While cost of living remains the key electoral concern, it is one that has been insufficiently addressed by both major parties.

Voters would have to search in desperation to find a grand vision for the future.

This has reduced the final run to the election to a singular issue – a contest over character.

With a little over a week before those voters who haven’t voted early must decide, Albanese remains the frontrunner. Dutton is now engaged in a renewal of effort to create doubt about the integrity of the Prime Minister.

Nothing can be assured in this sort of environment. Newspoll has Labor ahead 52-48 per cent nationally on two-party-preferred vote.

A hung parliament is possible on these numbers, and if the polls tighten even slightly over the final week, a minority Labor government becomes more likely.

There is no doubt that Labor’s posture at the beginning of the year was to approach this election campaign at a macro level from a deeply defensive position. Liberal strategists point to this as evidence Labor is worried about the outcome.

The weather has changed since then, and over the course of the campaign, and this is now a wrong assessment of Labor’s approach, based on its own internal polling.

Three months ago Labor was not in denial about the challenges it faced in Victoria. It was no secret that there was a significant level of concern about the number of seats that could be lost in that state.

The Labor campaign in Victoria has recently switched, however. It has moved to a mix of both defensive and attack.

In the past few days, Labor has expanded its campaign tactics into Liberal-held seats such as Menzies and Deakin, in an obvious offensive posture. This is unlikely to have shown up yet in the transparency data.

What this says is that both parties are preparing for an election that could produce a high exchange of seats.

Labor is not unrealistic about the likelihood that it may lose several seats, but is the Coalition prepared for the increasing possibility that it now stands to lose some as well?

In 2022, Labor felt at the end that it had the dominant argument that there were problems that had mounted up under the Coalition and the country couldn’t afford another three years of Scott Morrison.

Its argument was that the Coalition remained in denial about the problems needing to be fixed and the only way to take the country forward was through new leadership.

Labor managed to hold on to all its 2019 vote and was able to add to it. What the Coalition was trying to do was hold on to fence-sitters.

What is happening this time is a starkly different dynamic. There is no doubt there are swing voters who backed Labor in 2022 and who are now buying the Coalition message that households have gone backwards and the country can’t afford another three years of Albanese.

But then there are also those voters who backed the Coalition last time who think Labor hasn’t done too badly and are completely averse to Dutton.

This is producing an atypically high exchange, or churn, of votes. Whether this translates into a high exchange of seats will obviously hold the key to the election outcome.

And this is what makes that outcome so unpredictable. It is still not impossible the Coalition could carve out minority government. It remains unlikely, but no one should be thinking it’s over just yet.