'Stick with the current mob for a while'

The old coalition is based on culture more than policies. So most of the participants have a “Team Australia” approach to nationhood and borders, but don’t necessarily agree on economic policy. They do believe balancing budgets is important but issues like free speech and individual responsibility are likely to motivate them most strongly. Some will be parochial and others cosmopolitan.

It’s a similar coalition to the one that won the Brexit vote in the UK.

On our sample Turnbull comes out ahead of Shorten as preferred leader, but he has a bigger disapproval rating for his performance. This is because not only has he lost the Greens and ALP voters who originally thought he looked good, but the voters on his right, who had nowhere else to go, disapprove of who he is, but will grit their teeth and vote for him.

So in a personal head to head, Turnbull wins.

To a certain extent Labor has played into the Liberals’ hands. They have run a presidential campaign, and they have tried to compete as an alternative government. At the same time they have been fighting to keep the Greens out on their left and have run a lot of Greens’ issues in this election like climate change and gay marriage. This works against them.

There are not enough first and second preference votes between them and the Greens to quite make up 50% +1 of the electorate. Like Turnbull they also need non-Greens minor party votes. They won’t get them when they take the other side of the culture wars.

Presumably the Medicare scare campaign is an attempt to appeal to the non-Greens minor party demographic – which tends to be older and less affluent than the population as a whole, but our polling shows it is very low down on their list of concerns, although these voters do have a general concern about health.

Indeed, there is an air of desperation around the ALP advertising at the moment. I even saw a Google ad spruiking their ability to “Safeguard your Superannuation”. Not only is this fishing for a constituency unlikely to vote for them, but yesterday they revealed they would bank the government’s savings from the superannuation changes, thus confirming their policy is no different.

This image, showing the distribution of concepts for the most important issue in this federal election, shows exactly where the various party supporters sit. For Labor and Greens it is climate change, along with education and health. For the Liberals it is the economy and debt, and the non-Greens minor party voters are down the Liberal end and attach to the arguments in the middle about tax and services, but through the gateway of gay marriage.

We also tested voters on their response to the campaigns that the three major parties were running on their websites. The table below shows again how the non-Greens minor party voters are much more closely aligned with the Liberals.