Beyond the sliding doors election

"[T]his election…is a sliding doors moment for our nation," declared Peter Dutton, and maybe he was right, and in ways he didn't quite intend.

Sliding doors refers to the 1998 British film of the same name. The premise is that a seemingly minor event or decision can dramatically alter the course of a person's life.

The election results suggest the sliding doors analogy was accurate, at least as far as the Liberal Party was concerned. Polls late last year and early this showed them possibly narrowly winning government. With Labor dominant, and the Liberal Party routed, the doors slid and the alternate reality arrived.

And accurate too in the way voters treated the election - casually as though nothing much was at stake.

If Dutton had a chance of winning this election he needed to build a sense of crisis, but he didn't. It needed to be framed more like the Kokoda Track, from his perspective, than Sliding Doors.

In contrast Anthony Albanese needed to get people focussing on the future and convince them that he was a safe pair of hands and Dutton a risk, and that his stewardship was sound in a world less certain than it was 6 months ago.

On our polling, taken in two tranches, one finishing on April 3, right at the beginning of the campaign, and the second an "exit" poll taken over the weekend of the election and finishing at midnight on Monday May 5, it appears that Peter Dutton lost the election more than Anthony Albanese won it.

The deterioration in the Coalition vote and Dutton's standing is more dramatic than the increase in the Labor Party's and Albanese's.

I'm not saying Albanese didn't do well – he did – just that the Liberal Party did atrociously. True, the National Party held all their seats, but we don't have enough National Party respondents in our samples to make a comment on them.

Dutton was never that popular with our respondents, but his approval went from a net -19% to net -42% (a change of -23 percentage points) over the course of the election. At the same time Albanese went from -20% to -6% (a change of +14 percentage points).

Asked whether they believed the Opposition deserved to be the government, respondents agreed net -21% at the beginning of the campaign, but almost exactly mirrored Dutton's fall by ending up 21 points lower on -42%. On the same metric the Labor government went from -11% to +1%, a 12 point increase.

You might be beginning to see why voters were casual about this election at the beginning. Neither side appealed at the beginning, although they made a decisive decision by the end.