Everywhere you turn, the polls say that Peter Dutton is losing the election and public vote is slipping through his fingers despite the cost-of-living crisis deepening.

Which is perplexing, because people don’t like Labor.

They don’t trust Albanese. They think Bowen is a joke. Chalmers is delusional. Plibersek is a hypocrite. Wong is incompetent. And our Ambassador to the US is a liability.

Under Labor, the nation is drowning in debt, has been left almost entirely undefended, is enduring a cultural crisis, and a growing section of the population is poor and miserable.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel. Australians are staring dead-eyed into oblivion while Albanese dances around in front of the camera, clutching his Medicare card like a deranged court jester.

There is nothing to like about Canberra, so why are we waking up to headlines about Labor increasing its two-party preferred lead to 54.5 per cent over the Coalition’s 45.5 per cent?

That is, if we are to believe the polls.

They typically represent roughly a thousand people from a pool of 18 million registered voters. Conservatives tend to be under-represented in this style of survey. Remember the Voice to Parliament polls?

That said, there may be cause for the Coalition to worry.

The public forum of social media, where plenty of real conservatives are chattering away, is not enthusiastic about Peter Dutton.

Least worst, Labor-lite, disappointing, and weak are common sentiments. There is no science to it. I cannot publish a poll or prove this rising discontent on paper, but it is my job to spend a large amount of time listening and watching the public discourse. We know conservatives are cooling on Dutton in the same way that you know when a Christmas Party is drawing to a close.

The situation is recoverable if Dutton’s team makes adjustments over the next three weeks.

Instead of speculating, I decided to ask our readers what they make of the situation. There have been over 1,400 replies and counting.

Certainly, there are a lot of people who dismiss the polls out of hand, and that is a fair position.

The next most popular response is that Dutton is ‘half-pregnant’ and by that they generally mean he is running a soft campaign that never quite commits to big conservative ideas.

For example, Dutton supports women, but won’t openly call for a ban on biological men in women’s sports and spaces. He supports fossil fuels, but continues to push renewable energy and the Paris Agreement. He says free speech is important, then promotes censorship via misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech laws while praising the eSafety Commissioner. He creates an Australian DOGE, then insists it has nothing to do with Trump or Musk.

This tug-of-war between ideas and reality leaves voters unsure of his policies. Are women being protected? Will power bills get cheaper?

If they don’t know they won’t vote.

In seeking safety, the Coalition has left itself exposed to criticism without enough strength to defend itself. If it is an attempt to appease Teal voters, they need to stop.

Some respondents have been more direct, voicing their opposition to the Liberal Party’s position on free speech, Israel, and Ukraine. These voters are heading into the arms of minor parties (and we should note that there is no uniformity from the minor parties on these topics).

Indeed, there is a sub-movement breaking off from the larger freedom movement that contradicts many conservative ideals.

Understanding the freedom movement could be critical to forming government.

Let’s not forget how this started. A huge chunk of the population was carved off the political board with no other unifying idea beyond what the actual f-. It was a protest movement against a mass act of government tyranny during Covid that lacked a coherent political framework.

Naturally, the freedom movement is disintegrating and looking for a permanent political home. Not everyone is running in the same direction, but very few are running toward Dutton.

Traditional conservatives are congregating around One Nation as an official alternative to the Liberals because they are relatively mainstream, stable, and people know exactly what they are getting. One Nation is a blue ribbon wearing an orange jacket. Polls are reflecting this surge which will hopefully reward one of the most honest and dedicated men in politics, Senator Malcolm Roberts, who is up for re-election in the Queensland Senate.

What about the rest? They are probably worth four or five per cent of the conservative vote.

Rennick’s People First Party and the Libertarians are more complicated, as are their supporters. Typically, those who flock to their ranks harbour a more anti-Ukraine, Israel-sceptic worldview. Senator Rennick ended up in a bit of a self-inflicted mess regarding unfounded accusations about News Corp and Mossad while the Libertarians are struggling to keep the militant ideological positions of their members together as they come into conflict with the party’s broader appeal campaign.

The mainstream press has no clue what’s going on in the freedom movement because they never took the time to understand why people joined in the first place, but those of us who have watched closely from within can see that it has almost entirely separated.

The fallout from the pandemic has left Australians politically homeless, frustrated, and deeply suspicious. Many of these were once Liberals and that is something the party machine has never grappled with.

Further to the original problem regarding sliding polls, we have the Liberal Party’s slow campaign start.

They are two decades out of date, running a campaign strategy that was determined to ‘keep their cards close to their chest’. Too close. By the time the cards were revealed, Labor was already performing tricks for the crowd.

Social media is an early bird game and the Labor Party has been ruthless in drowning the conversation with their narrative. Being coy is not smart. Advisors need to understand that the old ways are dead. Elections work differently. By starting too late, their brand recognition was permanently damaged.

The final, more cynical, and yet I would argue perfectly accurate explanation is that people are voting for Labor hand-outs.

Bribery works. The poorer people get, the more likely they are to vote for anyone who throws money in their direction, even if that money is taken straight from their pockets.

This annoys traditional conservatives, who write the behaviour off as stupid peasant business, but those peasants have elected plenty of socialist dictatorships throughout history.

Poverty corrupts democracy far more than privileged societies like ours realise.

Are the polls right? I don’t know, but the ground chatter that we heard during the Voice to Parliament is not there for Dutton. Momentum requires something to believe in.

Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.