Some thoughts on the Queensland state election campaign

Campaigns are less successful at persuading undecided voters than they are at encouraging their own partisans to grow more fierce. The manic charges and countercharges of an election mostly remind voters which side they were on to begin with.

• from A game changer for campaign reporting a review of two books on the 2012 US presidential campaign.

That quote is a good starting point when looking at this Queensland election. The daily political messages delivered at door stops, the stunts performed for the television cameras, the learned analysis of every opinion poll, the campaign buses, the appearance of the leaders in marginal electorates; most of it means nothing. 

In my experience of campaigns state and federal - and it goes back 50 years - what will be on the day the election is called is what will be when the votes are finally counted.

So what was likely the day Labor's Annastacia Palaszczuk pressed her starting gun?

There's one very big clue to that. Premiers don't put their job at risk months earlier than necessary if they think they are going to lose. Labor's pollster, her own instinct and that of the party officials around her, must have been confident that now was the right time for victory.

Such judgments can be wrong but I notice the betting markets do not think so. They are giving Labor a 53% chance of winning (by having one of its team becoming Premier) to the Liberal National Party's 47%.

My pensioner's dollar would be going on Labor.