Paul Starick: Malinauskas is revelling in an electoral honeymoon at just the right time | Analysis

According to these numbers, Steven Marshall is about to go the way of Winston Churchill after the war, writes Paul Starick.

On these numbers, Saturday’s election is all over bar the voting.

Mr Marshall looks like going the way of Winston Churchill – revered by voters during the war on Covid-19 yet abandoned in its aftermath.

Starved of the spotlight during the pandemic, Labor Leader Peter Malinauskas is revelling in an electoral honeymoon at just the right time.

Labor has outpointed the Liberal campaign with a disciplined focus on hospital ramping and ambulance resources. By relentlessly talking about the future, Mr Malinauskas has managed to shed the baggage of Labor’s 16 years in power.

The evidence from this Advertiser-YouGov poll is that the relentlessly negative Liberal campaign, warning of the risks of returning to Labor, has failed dismally at a statewide level.

The big open question, though, is whether Labor can maintain and achieve in the right seats the extraordinary level of voter support revealed in the Advertiser-YouGov poll.

The major hope for Premier Steven Marshall is that the Liberals’ localised on-ground campaign is a lot better than their mistimed and meek statewide sales pitch.

Even if the Liberals overcame years of inept electioneering to skilfully dispatch both Labor and Nick Xenophon in 2018, it’s getting hard to conceive that a subterranean campaign masterstroke has been expertly concealed in the vital marginal seats.

These are the key to the election. The Liberals hold 22 seats and expect to win Frome after a redistribution. This would hand them 23 – one short of an outright majority.

But if Labor achieved 56 per cent of the two-party preferred vote in a uniform swing, it would easily win an outright majority by capturing Newland, Adelaide, King, Elder and, possibly, Colton, from the Liberals.

Swings are rarely uniform – as the Liberals discovered to their peril in 2010, when there were huge swings against Labor in their safe seats but not enough to depose the government.

This might provide false hope for the battered Liberals, though. Metropolitan Adelaide is the foundation of Labor’s electoral success in the past 60 years – since 1962 it has formed government after 12 of 18 elections.

A major opinion poll with results as decisive as this is not necessarily predictive. Already the clear favourite, Labor’s campaign will be boosted and the Liberal morale further sapped.

Presciently, former prime minister John Howard on March 11 told The Advertiser that the Liberals faced a historically challenging task to win and “it would be quite an achievement” for Premier Steven Marshall to be re-elected. Mr Howard was right.

Originally published as Paul Starick: Malinauskas is revelling in an electoral honeymoon at just the right time | Analysis