We're just three weeks away from the 2022 South Australian election and the first Newspoll of the campaign has just given a reminder of how challenging the Marshall Liberal Government's task is. The poll has the Coalition trailing 47-53 off primaries of Coalition 37 Labor 39 Greens 10 Others 14. Strikingly, Marshall trails Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas 39-46 as Better Premier (an indicator on which opposition leaders rarely lead unless governments are in big trouble). Marshall's own rating is a shadow of its former COVID-boosted self at a still reasonable net +1 (48-47) but Peter Malinauskas is doing much better at +20 (51-31).
Perhaps the latter offers some hope for the Liberals since they may be able to dent the Opposition Leader's image, but that the Marshall Government appears struggling to avoid a first-term defeat at this stage is not historically surprising. Firstly, the government was elected with a small majority and is federally dragged, so it would be expected to more likely than not lose some seats. Secondly federal drag also predicts how state governments will go compared to their leadup polling, which for the SA Liberals wasn't crash hot anyway. Thirdly the government has lost a majority it started with, and this is often associated with defeat (though I am a little more cautious about this at present given that voter contempt for hung-parliament games has seemed in recent years to be rising, both in Australia and the UK.) At some time analysts were wary of predicting state governments would lose after a single term, but first-term losses in Victoria 2014 and, far more spectacularly, Queensland 2015, reminded us that it does happen.
