Election 2022: Flip-flop voters confound strategists

The number of ‘soft’ voters set to determine the outcome of the May 21 election has spiked in the past week, Liberal Party research finds.

Scott Morrison campaigns in the marginal West Australian seat of Swan on Friday. Picture: Jason Edwards

The number of “soft” voters set to determine the outcome of the May 21 election has spiked in the past week, overturning the trend of past elections and reaching a campaign high of 27 per cent, ­according to confidential Liberal Party research.

The softening of voter sentiment toward the major parties in the fourth week of the campaign, as reported by campaign strategists, suggests the election was still up for grabs and would be decided by a growing number of ambivalent voters in the final two weeks of the campaign.

With pre-polling due to open on Monday, both Labor and the Coalition are engaged in hand-to-hand marginal seat combat to ­secure a persistently high number of voters considered to be those who could potentially switch their vote.

Both camps are now holding back on multimillion-dollar advertising blitzes for the final week of the campaign in a bid to swing the soft vote their way, with no ­indication from either party’s ­research yet on which way that vote was likely to turn.

They would need to shift strongly the Coalition’s way in the final two weeks of the campaign if Scott Morrison is to pull off a ­second “miracle” victory, with Labor holding a 53-47 per cent two-party-preferred lead in the latest Newspoll.

A senior Liberal Party source told The Weekend Australian that Coalition research showed that the number of “soft” voters had jumped between week three and four of the campaign from 23 per cent to 27 per cent.

This was unusual and historically inconsistent, as the soft vote traditionally follows a ­linear ­contraction from the start of a campaign to polling day.

“It has picked up or held steady at a time when you’d expect ­people to have started to make up their minds,” a Liberal source said.

Labor research is understood to confirm the unusual trend but has the overall number of soft ­voters much lower and in line with normal averages.

Labor campaign sources ­acknowledged, however, that the contest could tighten dramatically in the final weeks.

The “soft” vote is different to the undecided vote, which in Newspoll surveys is tracking at 7 per cent.

The soft vote includes undecided voters but also those voters who, while claiming to lean one way or the other, could switch their vote between the major ­parties.

A senior Labor campaign source told The Weekend Australian that they believed the movement in the soft vote ­showing up in research was a function of voters having not been engaged over the two long weekends and school holidays.

“There is no doubt that, in the second half of the school holidays, the level of voter engagement had dropped off,” they said.

There was also less voter ­engagement – during the period when Anthony Albanese was off the campaign with Covid – as a ­result of no big policy issues ­defining either side or dividing the contest and a long six-week campaign.

But voters had switched back on over the past week.

At the last election, the so-called soft vote was consistent in the mid-20s but narrowed sharply in the final days of the campaign, swinging sharply in the Coalition’s favour.

A Labor source said the party would not repeat the mistake of 2019, when it relaxed its campaign in the final days believing it had it won.

The Weekend Australian ­understands it will mount a big-strike final week of the campaign to prevent soft voters peeling off Labor to the Coalition.

Scott Morrison on Friday pegged his election prospects to what he claimed were higher than normal “soft” polling numbers.

The Prime Minister went on the attack, accusing Anthony ­Albanese of hiding behind a “small-target” strategy

Speaking in the marginal West Australian electorate of Swan, Mr Morrison accused his rival of not being fit to be prime minister following another election gaffe from the Opposition Leader on Thursday, when he was unable to recall his six-point plan to reform the NDIS.

“I don’t subscribe to the ‘small-target’ philosophy of leadership that others do,” Mr Morrison said.

“You can’t as prime minister. You can’t hide behind someone else when you don’t know the ­answers. You’ve got to know the details. You gotta sweat the small stuff to make the big calls. We can’t risk it with a man that makes it up as he goes along. Because the country depends on you knowing your stuff.”

A senior Labor MP suggested it was in Mr Morrison’s interest to promote the idea of an unusually high soft vote, to give the impression that the Coalition was still in the game.

“If those numbers are not as he suggests, then they don’t stand a chance,” they said.