If there was a single light bulb moment for the Labor campaign team, it didn’t come last Saturday night – that was the bolt of lightning.
The first surprise came after the first week of the election campaign when Peter Dutton announced he was dumping the much-maligned work from home policy.
Labor tracking of its target seats had its best night of the campaign ahead of this fatal moment for the Liberal leader. From then on, it rarely deviated.
In a layman’s terms, it blew out.
The shock and awe moment came at around 7.45pm on Saturday night when it became clear that Dutton’s seat of Dickson and the neighbouring LNP seat of Bonner were going to fall to Labor.
It was at that moment that Paul Erickson, the Labor campaign director, would have known it was over and he’d done his job.
But according to Labor insiders, no one, not even the naturally cautious Erickson, foresaw the scale of the victory that unfolded from there.
Labor’s campaign was built around winning a majority. It wasn’t built around winning 85 to 90 seats.
Even so, Labor’s final track was showing a 3.5 per cent swing on primary vote to it and around a 3 per cent swing on the two-party-preferred split.
This stood in stark contrast to the Coalition’s tracking being briefed out over the course of the campaign that Dutton and the Coalition’s favourability were strong. Both couldn’t be right.
What Labor’s track reflected was a general vibe that could have been extrapolated across other seats. While the temptation would have been there to translate that into a national landscape, hard-heads in the party were always going to rely on the seat polls to determine where it would end up.
Neither side was spending money on research outside this narrow band.
Labor’s tracking was a mix of 20 key seats that included both Labor and Liberal-held seats on close margins across all six states, most of them being the obvious ones that could be accounted for on the pendulum.
Seats such as Forde, Petrie, Longman, Hughes and Banks were not among them.
The fact they all fell to Labor on the night surprised even Labor. They were simply not in the mix.
Seats like Bonner, and Banks and Braddon in Tasmania, were definitely in the mix and as The Australian had reported in the days prior to the election, were potential surprise packets.
They didn’t disappoint for Anthony Albanese.
Something was happening outside the research program that couldn’t be, and wasn’t being, gauged beyond published polls.
As it turned out, Labor’s tracking result ended up reflecting the national result.
But this was not for a late swing to Labor in the dying days or hours of the campaign.
Contrary to some suggestions, there was no late surge. The undecided vote that many spoke of had been decided early on.
Labor’s track had established a significant lead across all its target seats by the middle of the second week of the campaign after the Dutton backdown on public servants working from home.
As a conviction leader, this hurt Dutton in perhaps as profound a way as the policy itself had damaged the Coalition’s standing among women.
The Labor track tightened up slightly over the course of the following weeks but Labor was always comfortably ahead.
It then improved again at the end of the campaign but not significantly. The final track before the campaign lifting slightly by around a point.
The late swing theory doesn’t apply. What was happening outside the track in those seats which surprised both sides goes to the central argument of the campaign. But it wasn’t being picked up.
Which is why Erickson and his team, while optimistic, were still nervous heading into Saturday night. Instinctively, Erickson is cautious. And he was far more so than his boss, Albanese, who had exuded confidence of getting to a majority throughout the campaign.
Yet even he was surprised by the scale of what that majority would look like in the end.
What proved to be a phantom was the influence of One Nation and Clive Palmer preferences saving the Coalition. While it is still too early to make this declaration, it is safe to assume this didn’t go the way the Coalition expected.
Erickson’s supposition was always a simple one – if you win the argument in the centre, that’s what leads to blow-outs in elections.
Newspoll had been consistently showing this up in its demographic analysis, with the final one early on in the campaign showing a 56-44 per cent lead for Labor among 35 to 49-year-olds – those grouped as Middle Australia, the mortgage belt.
This had moved sharply since the start of the year when it was closer to 50-50.
Central to winning this group was the argument over who would make you better off over the next three years.
Other factors such as Donald Trump and the negative campaign against Dutton as a risk all fed into this, but it was the fundamental question that remained the driver of votes.
And it was the argument that Ericson and Albanese knew last November – when the Coalition’s primary vote had peaked at 40 per cent – that they needed to set out to win.
Factors began to swing in their favour in February, which assisted with building this new narrative. Headline inflation was moderating and the first interest rate cut was delivered. And Newspoll began to accurately predict the decline in the Coalition vote.
In the end, while Newspoll’s primary vote analysis will be the most accurate prediction of the outcome, it was perhaps the final question of the campaign that Newspoll asked that revealed the most.
When asked who they thought would leave them better off over the next three years, 57 per cent of voters nominated Labor over 43 per cent for the Coalition.
What all the polling until then was showing was that the soft vote was leaning Labor’s way … and in the end, Albanese managed to hold on to that and win this argument, based on a simple question, on the day.
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