The Canberra Liberals need to examine why voters failed to back their candidates with a first preference despite the mood for change in the ACT, the party's president says.
Nick Tyrrell emailed party members on Monday afternoon, inviting full and frank responses to a future comprehensive review.
"The way forward is not yet determined on many levels. We first need to see what the final results are," Mr Tyrrell said.
"It looks like we've achieved an additional seat, but the rise of the independent vote since [David] Pocock's election [to the Senate in 2022] appears to have made gains significantly more challenging for us.
"We need to understand why the mood for change was so strong, but too many Canberrans couldn't quite put a #1 in the Liberal column and instead voted for 'teal' Independents."
A narrow path for the Liberals appeared to disappear on Monday, after the ABC called the fifth seat in Yerrabi for the Greens' Andrew Braddock.
If the seat went to Independents for Canberra's David Pollard, and the Liberals secured three seats in Brindabella, it would have been theoretically possible for the party to form a government with independent support.
Mr Tyrrell, who was elected party president in February, told party members the party had a lot of work to do in order to position itself for the 2028 election.
"There are many decision-points (as Donald Rumsfeld would call them) over the last four years that contributed to the result on Saturday night. We need to carefully consider all of them and resolve to do better this term," he said.
Mr Tyrrell said he did not want to pre-judge the outcomes of the post election review, because to be truly committed to success meant waiting for feedback and being prepared to act on evidence.
"As a business person I think of voters as our customers, and we need to understand what they want from us in a clinical, objective, data-driven way," he said.
"This is critical if we are to build on the seat we look to have gained on Saturday night, and position for victory in 2028."
Jeremy Hanson, the top performing Liberal in Murrumbidgee, on Monday confirmed his bid to take over the leadership of the Canberra Liberals, a position he held from 2013 to 2016.
"When I was last leader, in an environment that was far less favourable, the vote was quite a bit bigger and we were able to get 11 seats and we were on the cusp of 12," Mr Hanson told The Canberra Times.
"We should have done much better in this election. This election is where we should have been growing significantly in the number of seats and getting into government, and we haven't done that."
Elizabeth Lee, who has led the party since 2020, on Saturday said she would take time to consider her future.
While Mr Hanson sought to position himself as a leader who could move beyond a conservative versus moderate argument in the party, other Liberals warned against a rightward shift.
Nicole Lawder, the Brindabella Liberal who did not recontest her seat, said on the ABC's election night broadcast "it doesn't sit well with the general Canberra population to be far to the right".
Asked if powerful conservative players in the party needed to release the reins, Ms Lawder said she hoped they would.
"I fear they're going to say, 'We had a progressive leader in Elizabeth Lee and we still lost, so we need to lurch more to the right'," she said.
Mark Parton, who won a quota in his own right to retain his Brindabella seat, told ABC Radio on Monday the Liberals' only path to power was from the centre.
The Liberals' 2020 election review said the party should have sought to influence "soft Green voters" who were "attracted on environmental issues but deterred by the radical side of the Greens' agenda".
The review also said consultants should be employed to "help improve the skills of MLAs and their senior staff on policy development".
People close to the 2020 campaign said not enough work had been done in the three years before 2020 and the work completed was inadequate.
The review recommended completing more campaign preparation ahead of the election year.
