Old-school political sledges reveal key target voters as leaders re-calibrate their election strategies

Peter Dutton’s campaign team have clearly realised they’re in trouble, and that presents a danger to both sides.

After the first full week of the campaign, Anthony Albanese looks more confident than Dutton on the trail, and the ALP campaign machine is more ruthless.

But for the Liberals, “they’ve completely ballsed-up their campaign,” is Redbridge pollster Kos Samaras’ blunt assessment.

The Coalition team have started recalibrating: Monday’s public service backflip, the stream of photo ops at petrol stations talking fuel excise cuts after a veteran commentator pointed out Dutton hadn’t done any, a fresh approach to managing media scrums.

The move to dump the public service work-from-home crackdown was a big red flag from the Coalition that it knew it had got the politics wrong.

Even Barnaby Joyce conceded his wife, a political staffer, had been upset by the WFH policy.

But with early voting starting in just a fortnight, it remains to be seen whether this is too little, too late.

By contrast, Labor recalibrated its offerings over the summer.

Over the past couple of months, Anthony Albanese has made a big pitch to win back the women in their 30s and 40s who had started to slip away.

The stabilisation of Labor’s primary vote after 12 months of a downhill slide suggests it’s worked.

ALP insiders are conscious that although they have momentum, there’s still a long way to go, especially if the Coalition brings the campaign nous they had feared.

Many voters are still “soft”, or open to shifting to the other side.

There are dangers ahead for Albanese and Dutton that risk entrenching voter perceptions and stalling those recalibrations.

On the macro scale, Donald Trump’s tariffs have sent global markets roiling.

The US administration says dozens of countries had been in touch begging for carveouts (Australia included). What Trump does next is anyone’s guess.

The Coalition is looking to seize political advantage but faces a tricky balance to do so.

This feeds into the second danger: Tuesday night’s leaders debate.

Albanese performed solidly in the 2022 debates, but he and Dutton can both be prone to loose remarks.

Plus they’ve spent enough time niggling each other across the table in Parliament to know the other’s sore points.

The Liberal leader needs to start talking to the people he doesn’t already have in his column.

Millennials and Gen Z voters are the biggest cohort in this election, overtaking Boomers and older Australians for the first time.

Yet a veteran conservative strategist just laughed when asked if Dutton was doing enough to win over younger voters. Maybe on housing, they said, but hardly anyone knew what the policy was.

Dutton resorts to political references so old that few younger voters would get them: “L-A-W tax cuts”, using “Whitlamesque” as an insult.

This does little but delight Labor die-hards and baffle younger generations – and make you wonder where Dutton is pitching his campaign.

Elections are no time for deep cuts – economic or pop culture.