Campaigners use a list of electorates ordered from the safest to weakest to plot a campaign. But that playbook has gone out the window.
Teal independents targeting heartland Liberal and Labor seats around the country are prompting major parties to tear up their traditional campaign strategies as they confront the challenge of having to defend twice as many seats.
“This time you’re going to see [major party] campaigners going into seats which they haven’t had to defend properly in 10 or 20 years, and it’s a big job because they may not have the infrastructure that you’d expect to see in traditionally marginal seats – such as volunteers, networks and high-quality localised data on voters.The NSW Liberals are facing challenges in blue-ribbon electorates that have traditionally been regarded as safe, given they are held on margins upwards of 15 per cent.
North Shore, held by Liberal Felicity Wilson, is also under threat after local campaigners “North Sydney’s Independent” confirmed they were scouting for a candidate.Mr Turner, a veteran pollster and campaigner who has advised both state and federal Liberals, said he believed the teals faced a stiffer challenge to win seats from Liberals in the state election than at the federal poll.
“They have all of this information that they’ve gathered at the federal level and it might be the case that they have more information [in some electorates] about voters than the Liberals do,” Mr Turner said. “The Liberals will not have focused their efforts in these seats at previous elections, choosing instead to push resources to traditional Liberal-Labor contests, where they will have a deeper understanding of the electorate.
He pointed to Liberal seats in the Victorian election where candidates, such as the newly minted party leader John Pesutto, had gone some way to distinguish themselves from the party by pursuing a more progressive line in their communication with voters than the more conservative section of the party.
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