Graph reproduced from Possum’s post.
Possum Comitatus has calculated what he thinks is the Liberal base vote - the number of voters who’ve never voted for Labor over the Coalition at any level of government, basing his estimates on the lowest the Tory vote has fallen in elections over the last decade.
Brendan Nelson is leading a party that is receiving a national vote share lower than all of the State Opposition annihilations of late put together. It makes the polling bleakness of early 2001, and that of March/April 2007 look like a golden age of popularity by comparison.
If that’s not bad enough, if we look at the way those State annihilations of the Opposition played out in practice, a sort of electoral hysteresis was operating. State ALP governments eroded the State Coalition vote to the point where the Coalition base started contracting, leading to an almost natural, lower long-term level of Coalition electoral support as a result - a level of support from which the State Oppositions have found it almost impossible to recover from, consigning themselves to a generation of political failure.
If you lose your base, you lose your political viability.
In a week when Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull’s performance is going to be as much on the line as Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd’s, it’s interesting to consider this in tandem with what Mark had to say last week:
