Pauline’s WA Coalition deal killing her support?

This is interesting from Crikey’s William Bowe:

Even by the remarkable standards she has set for herself over the past two decades, the coming week looms as a significant time in the political life of Pauline Hanson.

Since last year’s federal election, One Nation has built a momentum that seemed impervious to its familiar difficulties in maintaining parliamentary cohesion amid the Rod Culleton saga.

Even as this unfolded, the election campaign rulebook was being rewritten in the United States by Donald Trump, whose various affronts to dignity, decency and good sense were greeted as campaign-ending calamities by the media establishment — spectacularly wrongly, as it turned out.

The lesson seemed to be that a state of disarray serves only to enhance the appeal of populists like Hanson and Trump, whose principal selling point is the disruption they promise to unleash on a remote political class that governs in its own interests.

However, the unfolding fiasco that has been One Nation’s Western Australian campaign has tested this thesis to its limits, and it may well be that the cracks are finally starting to show.

Controversies surrounding the eccentricity of some of the party’s candidates were predictable enough, but the bigger and less anticipated story has been the backlash over the preference deal with the Liberals.

One Nation dumped two of its candidates last week after they spoke out against the Liberal deal, and another announced over the weekend said he was “giving it away” because he felt the deal to be “dishonest”.

Other critics may have been spared disendorsement because of their personal clout, or because they were in seats where the party couldn’t afford to go without a candidate.

While outbreaks of internal discord are by no means unfamiliar to the party, this one seems to have a dangerous parallel among the electorate at large — as illustrated by the chart below, which contrasts the party’s standing in state opinion polls (three from ReachTEL and one apiece from Newspoll, Galaxy, Essential Research and Morgan) with a federal trend going back to last year’s election.

A long-running upward trend that shows no sign of abating federally was alive and well at the start of the state campaign, when Newspoll recorded the party’s primary vote at 13%, and an Essential Research poll conducted for the Greens had it at 13.7%.

Then came the announcement of the preference deal on February 12, followed by a downward turn that brought the party inside single figures in the two polls published over the weekend (8.5% from ReachTEL, 9% from Galaxy).

The seemingly allergic reaction will have been noted with concern by both parties in Queensland, where the Liberal National Party had been viewing a preference arrangement as a potentially decisive factor in a state election expected later this year, and One Nation was sizing up a power-sharing arrangement in the event of a hung parliament.

Protest parties always have trouble when they turn insider.