ELECTION TRAIL Part of the campaign is aggressive and negative – but does the data support the strategies?
The Tasmanian election will be remembered for a remarkably negative advertising campaign, but does the data support the political strategy?
B eyond the glossy images of the photogenic leaders of Tasmania’s Liberal and Labor parties, it can be hard to distinguish who’s who in the March 3 State Election campaign. The faces of candidates set against the dominant party colours of blue, red and green can be seen on roadside poster boards, but none is as visible as the faces of Premier Will Hodgman and Opposition Leader Rebecca White.
The campaign has some of the hallmarks of a presidential election. Like US President Donald Trump’s big-spending, populist 2016 election campaign, the Tasmanian election will be remembered for the scale and aggressively negative nature of the Liberal Government’s advertising blitz, and industry involvement and lobbying on divisive issues such as Labor’s pokies pol- icy and minority government. Though Tasmanian political analysts believe Tasmanian politicians are increasingly using data to determine where to focus their efforts, they say it’s unlikely their election campaign strategies have been influenced by the sophisticated data mining and analysis provided by companies such as Cambridge Analytica, which played a key role in Trump’s 2016 election campaign and the UK’s Brexit campaign.
“The amounts of Liberal Party advertising even before the election was called does seem to be unprecedented in Tasmania,” says Professor of Political Science Richard Eccleston, who is the director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of Tasmania.
“Television advertising is more important than social media for the 10 to 20 per cent of voters who aren’t engaged in poli- tics. If you saturate mainstream popular television it’s the best way to capture those people. Expect to see a lot more of it before the election.”
Eccleston says the Liberals came out early with the negative advertising, “partly because I think they were surprised that in an EMRS poll they were level-pegging with Labor. They are partly campaigning on their economic record, which has been reasonably strong, but they can’t push that too far. But they’re also running this scare campaign about the legacies of the last Labor-Green government”.
The prospect of minority government was always going to be packaged as a key issue. The Hodgman Government, which currently holds a majority with 15 of the 25 seats in State Parliament, has steadily lost ground to Labor over the past two years,