Voters will keep voting Labor, even when dissatisfied

Of course, we don't know how the change of Liberal leadership to Angus Taylor will be read by the electorate, but it is easy to see why the party room moved on Ms Ley.

Analysing elections on the basis of the two-party preferred vote in this situation becomes complicated because you aren't really sure which two parties are going to be left at the end of the day, and it will vary depending on which electorates you are looking at.

We did two party-preferred analyses – one with the Coalition versus Labor and one with One Nation versus Labor. Labor won against the Coalition by 54 per cent to 46 per cent, but by 56 per cent to 44 per cent against One Nation. If One Nation stays ahead of the Coalition, Labor's job gets 2 per cent easier – a huge margin in federal elections.

I don't think anyone has seen this sort of dynamic in elections since the DLP split in the ALP in 1957, which arguably kept Labor out of power for 15 years. Albanese has got very lucky. Of course it's not the same, because the DLP funnelled second preferences to the Coalition, but One Nation at the moment could even supplant the Liberal Party.

According to our polling voters are looking for stability, and with One Nation and the Coalition level pegging, or One Nation in front, the centre right doesn't look like stable whereas Labor does, a sentiment which is expressed by many Labor voters.

When we look at the polls, there is also a lot of hatred of One Nation with supporters being described as 'racists', 'stupid', and 'bigoted' by left-of-centre voters. The party is also unsettling to swinging voters, increasing the chances of them directing their first preference to Labor or Greens and away from the Liberal Party if it has an association with One Nation.

Climate change disappeared as an issue during the federal election, mostly because the argument was over technology – nuclear versus wind and solar – rather than whether it was real. It is back in this sample and most likely to be associated with Greens.

Greens and ALP voters are also worried there is a rise in fascism and racism, and inequalities in wealth. This is tangled-up with concerns about the USA, which is almost the only time foreign affairs was mentioned by any group.

Conservative voters are worried about cost of living, inflation, debt, spending and productivity, values and social cohesion. Immigration is the word most closely associated with them.

Control is also a key word – as in the government has lost control – for Coalition voters and it is closely clustered with economic and practical issues.

Labor, Coalition, and minor right-wing party voters are all concerned about the economy, although Labor voters think it is generally going well, while those on the right think it is going poorly. The middle ground is filled with the issues of energy, power, and housing, which is where you would expect the political debate to concentrate.

The Liberals have now changed leader, so that makes some of this analysis irrelevant, but at a deeper level nothing has changed. The centre and right votes have split because Liberal voters recognise more Liberal values in One Nation than the party they have an historical tribal allegiance to – the Liberals. This can't be clawed back easily and has been in the making a long time.

The split, where the vote is shared with a party many Australians viscerally hate, also makes the first preference vote for the Liberal Party difficult if the only way they could feasibly come to government is in some sort of an arrangement with that party.

Labor's vote might be 'wide but shallow', but it is hard to see it evaporating or being breached under the current voting split on the right. It's not really anything that Labor has done either, it is a development caused by strategically inept Liberal and National parties losing support to a party that says what a lot of voters want to hear and has been consistently saying that for 30 years.