From Crikey:
Some guide at least is offered by state-level breakdowns of federal voting intention from the published pollsters, which when run through the BludgerTrack poll trend model show the Coalition on 45.5% (down 5.7% on the election), Labor on 31.2% (up 2.4%), the Greens on 11.9% (up 2.2%) and Palmer United on 5.9% (up 0.6%).
Even after accounting for the lower vote share typically recorded by major parties in the Senate, this suggests the established parties are strong enough to produce a traditional result of three Liberal, two Labor and one Greens, with no repeat of last year’s micro-party boilovers. However, the difficulty with these figures is that they are derived from a trend calculation and thus slow to respond to short-term developments.
An advertising juggernaut has steamrolled voters over the last fortnight courtesy of Clive Palmer, who looks to be repeating his feat of last September in spending his way into contention over the final weeks of the campaign. Some of the most recent results from WA show Palmer United breaking into double figures, and while the samples involved are uniformly small, the numbers are impressively consistent in having the party at or near 10%.
The Liberals particularly are devoting more energy than they would like to fighting off the Palmer insurgency, but it’s far from clear that their efforts are doing him more harm as good.
The West Australian has made Palmer the cover star twice this week, and while the reports themselves were highly unflattering, Palmer might well be of a mind to regard any publicity as good publicity. While similar efforts by Palmer failed to yield any dividends at the recent Tasmanian election, he seems considerably more at home making his pitch to the nation’s leading mining state.
His television advertising has adroitly tapped into deeply held grievances about the state’s share of GST revenue, a subject the major parties dare not go near for fear of alienating voters in other states …
Should Palmer United achieve its breakthrough, the question arises as to whether its win will be at the expense of the Liberal or the Labor-Greens side of the equation. To win a seat directly at the expense of Linda Reynolds would require that the near 40% gap that separated the Coalition (44.3%) from Palmer United (5.0%) at the September election be reduced to more like 30%. The easier path involves Palmer United winning a seat in addition to Reynolds, again leaving Scott Ludlam and Louise Pratt fighting over the second seat on the Left.
Crikey indeed. I have become a stranger in a strange land.
