One of the basics of election campaigns is image control: make sure that every night on the evening commercial news bulletins there are images of the leader doing something positive.
There’s a longstanding belief that if you couple positive images with positive analysis and reportage, you’ll win the day. Win enough days, you win the campaign. And winning the campaign can be enough to overcome a polling gap that existed before the campaign started.
2019 was a classic case, and showed Scott Morrison was a master of the technique. Now he’s pursuing the same strategy. Every day he’s making some minor announcement — often a new handout — and then being filmed in situ. The role of hi-vis vests and helmets in campaigns has long been mocked, but Morrison is undeterred, and happily cosplays for the cameras wherever he goes.
Mock if you like, but it’s about the images, about the small number of disengaged and undecided/uninterested voters who pay no attention to politics but might catch a glimpse of a politician on the news. That glimpse, that brief moment, is the chance to convey a positive or negative image.
But as colleague Cam Wilson has pointed out, it seems that the more Morrison gets about generating those images, the less voters like him. All polls show the Coalition’s vote, and Morrison’s net approval rating, falling during the campaign after a brief rise at the start following Albanese’s first-day gaffe.
And female voters look to be deeply hostile to Morrison.
As The Australian Financial Review’s Phil Coorey pointed out after the latest Ipsos poll, Morrison’s numbers among female voters are dire and not shifting.
Labor’s primary vote lead among women is eight, compared with five among men. His net disapproval is 23 among women and 16 among men. Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister is seven among women and he has led among women throughout the campaign. Men have tilted Albanese’s way only in the latest poll, 41-38.
When did the collapse in female support for Morrison happen? Roy Morgan polling provides some clues. It tracks male and female two-party-preferred outcomes. Both male and female support for Labor pulled away dramatically from support for the Coalition in 2021 — but at different dates. Male support suddenly shifted in November-December, and began a steep trajectory of rising support for the ALP.
That coincides with the period when the government’s failure to secure rapid antigen tests, and the inability of people to find any, was dominating the news.
But women turned towards Labor much earlier in the Roy Morgan data: in February, when Brittany Higgins emerged to reveal her ordeal and treatment by the government. At that exact point, female voters — who were about evenly split on the parties over the pandemic — shifted to Labor, and it only got worse after that.
Morrison’s comprehensive bungling of the Higgins matter — will we ever find out who in his office was briefing against her partner, or will that inquiry vanish with Phil Gaetjens? — and the astonishing failure of both he and Christian Porter to properly deal with historical allegations of rape made against the latter (which Porter denies) drove female voters en masse from the Coalition.
The reemergence of the alleged disgusting treatment of Rachelle Miller during the campaign — with Morrison confirming the invisible Alan Tudge would return as education minister after the election despite an alleged huge payout to Miller — will only serve to reinforce the view that Morrison has a profoundly troubling view of women and their right to workplace safety.
The gap in the Morgan poll is still stark despite some narrowing during the campaign: Labor leads by 16 points on a two-party-preferred basis among women, compared with just two points among men.
The long campaign Morrison planned was designed to run down Labor’s lead so he could exploit his alleged campaigning genius. But he appears to have only confirmed to half the electorate what they worked out more than a year ago.
