Here’s the poll that should see every Coalition political adviser in this country fired immediately. It’s from the Wall Street Journal last week. It measured the shift in political alignment of white, suburban women in the US. These women comprise a fifth (and for those who finished high school in Australia in the last decade that is 20 per cent) of the entire American electorate. And this poll had the stunning result that since late August – so from 60 odd days ago till now – these white, suburban women had moved 27 points from the Democrats to the Republicans. They now lean Republican by net 15 points. To state the bleeding obvious, this poll is well outside the margin of error. It foreshadows a Republican tsunami in the mid-terms. (And full disclosure to readers, I am writing this before election day in the US while readers are seeing it afterwards. But for a couple of months now I’ve been predicting big gains for the Republicans and that they’ll win both the House and the Senate quite easily and I’m sticking to that. In fact, I may be under-estimating the Republican mid-term win. So that’s my hostage to fortune prediction. I make it without my usual failsafe method of just going with the opposite of what Peter van Onselen predicts, a route which virtually never lets me down.)

Now why do I think this WSJ poll is devastating for the insider, adviser political caste? Because it shows they think of women in identity politics terms where all XX chromosome beings are some sort of clone of your typical ABC on-air journalist. You know, women who saw in apocalyptic terms the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the recent Dobbs case that undid the judicially made-up-out-of-thin-air constitutional right to an abortion sending the issue back to the state legislatures and the democratic process. Just as it is here in Australia. Indeed, abortion and that Supreme Court renunciation of Roe v. Wade have been pretty much the main message pumped out by the Democrats these last few months. And that would work just fine if all women were less housewives and more – if I can put it this way – fishwives. Abortion plays big amongst the grievance politics caste of women. Or the professional board member types who demand affirmative action spots for, well, themselves. Or those who can’t seem to grasp one of the core concepts of our legal system, the presumption of innocence with its foundational precept that it is better that many guilty go free than that an innocent person go to jail. And my claim is that far too many of the advisers to our Coalition politicians in this country think that it is these women to whom conservative politicians need to fashion their policies. Heck, these were the only women former PM Morrison seemed to have in mind when he jettisoned the presumption of innocence at every chance he got.

But that’s just flat out wrong. Most women, like most men – and certainly most women and men who are remotely inclined to vote for the right-of-centre party – care a lot about cultural issues. I refer to the insane injection of transgender and other woke notions into the school curriculum (in part at the expense of doing something about our God-awful, and still falling, school results).  I refer to the evils of cancel culture on steroids which force many on the right to keep quiet or be informally punished but allow anyone with progressive, lefty views to say what she (or he) feels like saying. I refer to the woeful, thuggish, despotic imposition of lockdowns, mandates and school closures that sacrificed the future prospects of myriad youth, especially the poor – and note that virtually all of the new Republican candidates in the US who are going to win have no links at all to any of these lockdownista policies or heavy-handed brutalisations of their fellow citizens. I refer to the mass illegal immigration that has seen nearly five million illegal aliens pour in, actually being welcomed in, under Biden. (Note to readers: The Tories in Britain promised to do something about the same phenomenon there and it has instead gotten worse and this, in my view, will kill them at the next election barring some effective steps before then. But don’t hold your breath.) I refer to the net-zero cult here that does zero to lower temperatures but impoverishes us all. These sort of culture war issues are not little vote winners. They are huge vote winners. Look at the recent win by the Governor of Virginia on school issues alone. And look at the US mid-terms that just happened. Suburban women care as much about culture issues as men do. In fact, if this WSJ poll is right they care more about them.

And yet our conservative political adviser class in this country seems wholly incapable of fighting on these issues. They, and their MP clients, just roll over and play nice every time, all the time. During the last nine years of Coalition governments the universities got worse (on free speech, on affirmative action, on cancel culture, on the near total lack of conservative academics) every single year our side was in office (but seemingly not in power). Is all of this because these advisers overwhelmingly get into politics at university? Then get a job at a think tank or in a minister’s office? Then start to think that all women, heck all potential conservative voters, are like them and (you know) really do more or less share the cultural worldview of the ABC and the upper echelons of the Canberra public service?

Now obviously the Biden administration has been one of the most incompetent in the past century and a half. It has nearly tripled petrol prices and taken inflation from 1.4 per cent when Trump left office to near on 9 per cent now. (And no, this is not mostly because of ‘Putin’.) So sure, these inflation and cost of living issues matter. But they were in play in late August. It is the cultural issues that regular women and men care about it. It is that that in my view is largely responsible for the massive swing of women away from the woke, pronoun-displaying, Western heritage-loathing lefties. Boris refused to fight on this battlefield. At the state level the Coalition refuses to fight on this ground. So far Dutton, for whom I had big hopes, has refused to engage with the censorious, cultural Left. Meanwhile in the US the Republicans are engaging, fighting, and racking up huge wins.

As I said, every political adviser to the Coalition needs to be fired. The sooner the better.