Politics is meant to recede from front pages at this time of year, slipping quietly into the background of summer barbecues and cricket on radio and TV. But not in 2026. Instead, the headlines this month have been crowded with anxiety: the fallout from Bondi and rancid debate over hate laws; a writers festival imploding; Donald Trump resurrecting the Monroe Doctrine while torching NATO in real time; Iran brutally crushing its own people under cover of a digital blackout; and One Nation surging above the ever imploding Coalition in the latest Newspoll.

Wednesday’s inflation shock and the prospect of another interest rate rise can only heighten household fears, shrinking Albanese Labor’s margin for error, and reopening the question of economic competence at precisely the moment voters are least forgiving of instability.

In this kind of political weather, it’s easy to forget what happened at the 2025 federal election – not just that Labor won, but why. The patterns that decided that contest are precisely the ones shaping today’s volatility, fear and fragmentation. To understand where politics is heading, we need to remember how voters felt then and what they were trying to avoid.

Published late last year, the most striking finding of the Australian Election Study, a comprehensive post-election survey that has been conducted at every federal election since 1987, was that voters, for the first time since the series began, judged the Labor Party to be a better economic manager than its rivals. For four decades the Coalition enjoyed a near-automatic advantage, but that dominance appeared to collapse almost overnight. Labor was also rated ahead on cost of living and even taxation policy.

At first glance, this is a historic ideological reversal. A closer reading tells a more nuanced story. Economic optimism is subdued. The AES shows 42 per cent of voters believed the economy would be in worse shape in a year’s time, and just 24 per cent thought it would be better. It’s one of the bleakest readings since the early 1990s. If voters were so pessimistic, why didn’t they turn to Peter Dutton.

Part of the answer lies in how voters form judgments, cast votes, and justify themselves. In 2019, the Coalition held a 26-point lead over Labor as “better economic managers”. That lead narrowed sharply in 2022 and evaporated in 2025. Yet what the AES shows is that voters’ assessments of economic competence frequently follow their vote, rather than precede it. Winning parties inherit credibility after elections, while losing parties lose it.

This is not a failure of voters to understand economics. It is how political psychology works. As the American political scientist Drew Westen argued two decades ago, the political brain is an emotional brain. Voters do not arrive at political conclusions by running spreadsheets in their heads. They begin with instinct, then recruit reason to justify the gut choice they have already made. The brain defends the conclusion it prefers. When fear collides with facts, fear wins, and reason steps in later to explain why fear was “common sense” all along.

Seen this way, the AES does not contradict the election story; it completes it. Voters did not reason their way away from Dutton. They recoiled from him in their guts, then reconstructed a story about Labor’s economic competence to make that recoil feel logical. That matters, because Labor’s retrospective credibility can be granted quickly and withdrawn just as fast.

Cost of living looms large

Campaign-period data reinforces this distinction. Redbridge Group track-polling of key seats provided to this author shows that throughout the campaign the Coalition retained an advantage over Labor on cost-of-living policy – the top issue for voters and a rough proxy for economic management – even as both major parties underwhelmed. Early in the campaign, 22 per cent of respondents rated the Liberals as very good or good on cost of living (net -23 per cent), compared with just 13 per cent for Labor (net -55 per cent). This gap narrowed but did not disappear by polling day. Labor’s post-election economic halo, in other words, must be understood as voter psychology catching up with ballot choices already made.

Income data further underlines the point. Traditional class cues have weakened. Redbridge’s final-week survey shows that among households earning $3000 or more a week, Labor and the Coalition enjoyed roughly equal primary support. Nearly a third of voters opted for the Greens or independents. It’s a result that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, when high income functioned as a near-proxy for Coalition loyalty. At the other end, voters earning under $1000 a week were also volatile. Labor was equal with the Coalition and facing substantial leakage to minor parties like One Nation. Again, this was unthinkable a generation ago, when low income functioned as a proxy for Labor loyalty. Nonetheless, rather than a simple collapse of class-based voting, what we see is a partial realignment at the extremes, flux and fragmentation and growing dealignment everywhere else. This is a potential worry for Labor as there are obviously more low than high income earners.

Politically fragmented middle

Middle-income earners – where elections are won and lost – favour Labor but this support is unstable. Among households earning $1000-$1999 a week, Labor led the Coalition, but a full third of voters backed the Greens, independents or minor parties. For those earning $2000 –$2999 a week, the Coalition retained an edge, but without the commanding dominance of decades past.

The lesson is unsettling for both Labor and the Liberals: an economically insecure, politically fragmented middle, with voters drifting away from the majors altogether.

What does this mean for class politics? The central problem in contemporary debates about class is not that we talk too little about it, but that we rarely define it clearly. The AES reflects this ambiguity by design. Rather than imposing a ­sociological classification based on income, occupation or wealth, it asks Australians how they see themselves: “working class”, “middle class” or “upper class”. When Australians describe themselves with these terms – and rarely “upper” – they are not simply reporting income. They are expressing insecurity, aspiration, and culture. We must make two caveats. First, class identity is relative. A suburban tradie in 1990 and an inner-city professional in 2025 can call themselves “middle class”, despite inhabiting utterly different worlds. Second, class categories have shifted. Working class once referred to industrial labour; today it spans care work, retail, logistics and services.

The AES cannot tell us what class is. But it tells us how Australians experience class politically, and, over time, that matters a great deal. In the 20th century, class and voting in Australia aligned with brutal clarity: working-class voters backed Labor, while middle- and upper-class Australians preferred anti-Labor parties. Class cleavages roughly coalesced with religion: working-class Catholics and middle-class Protestants formed overlapping social, cultural and political blocs that locked identity, class and party loyalty into a single, durable alignment. Early AES data captures this world vividly. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, class identity reliably predicted party choice.

Divide distinction dulls

That alignment has since eroded without wholly reversing. Between 2016 and 2022, Labor’s support among working-class voters fell sharply, before rebounding to 38-39 per cent in 2025, alongside a decline in working-class identification (and paradoxical middle-class increase). The working class did not simply swing right; it drifted from both majors. Roughly a quarter of these voters backed One Nation or independents. Similarly, while middle-class voters lean Coalition (37-38 per cent), the margin over Labor has narrowed (32-33 per cent).

As class and religious cleavages weakened, education replaced it as the strongest predictor of vote choice. The 2025 AES shows a sharp divide between university-educated voters and non-graduates. Graduates over­whelmingly favoured Labor and the Greens, while non-graduates split more evenly between Labor, the Coalition, One Nation and independents. These differences persist even when income is held constant. Education now functions as a cultural sorting mechanism, reshaping class politics without eliminating what remains of its structure. The old alignment – battlers to Labor, elites to the Coalition – has given way to structuralised, perhaps permanent volatility. The AES shows that in 1987 about 60 per cent of Australians said they always voted for the same party. By 2025, that figure had fallen to roughly a third.

Generational divides intensify these trends. Redbridge’s quantitative research showed that more than 80 per cent of Millennials and Gen Z nominated cost of living as the top issue, with housing close behind. Yet confidence that government would materially improve living standards was low, even among Labor voters. Anxiety, not optimism, defined victory.

The gender gap sharpened this dynamic. Female voters, particularly younger women and working mothers, were markedly more risk averse. Policies around forcing workers back into offices, threats to Medicare and around public services landed harder with women than men. Men were more likely to entertain the Coalition’s economic case in the abstract; women were more likely to reject it viscerally on grounds of safety, predictability and trust. This gap – visible across the AES and Redbridge – proved electorally decisive in metropolitan seats.

‘Safer’ versus ‘scary’

Only once this quantitative frame is clear does the qualitative evidence fully make sense. In Redbridge focus groups, participants rarely described voting Labor because of a bold reform agenda or a compelling economic vision. Instead, they spoke in comparative and defensive terms: stability, normality, not wanting chaos. Labor felt “safer”. Dutton felt “scary”.

Those words came up repeatedly, along with “dangerous”. Dutton’s Liberals offered policies that voters could personally find threatening. Nuclear power raised fears about safety and cuts to government services. Ending work-from-home arrangements alarmed women and families. Immigration unsettled migrant communities. Policy backflips compounded a sense of volatility. The Coalition’s campaign did not feel disciplined or coherent; it felt risky.

Timing amplified the effect. As the campaign entered its decisive phase, global uncertainty spiked. Trump’s trade war flared just as soft voters were tuning in. At a moment when households already felt financially exposed, voters wanted predictability and competence. Instead, the Liberals spoke about the importance of “government efficiency” and public service sackings and played down the impacts of climate change, aligning with Trump-style MAGA politics in voters’ minds. Combined with Dutton’s historically low popularity, the association was electorally toxic, and our polling and groups told us so. The issues most likely to determine who voters would oppose were overwhelmingly weighted against the Coalition: global uncertainty linked to Trump, fears nuclear power would mean cuts to public services, concerns people would be personally worse off under a Dutton government, and lingering anxiety about Medicare. What decided the election, then, was not policy platforms but something far older and visceral: fear.

The structural implications are frightening for Coalition hardheads. Redbridge’s accurate exit polling confirms the Coalition’s generational problem is baked into the electorate. Among Gen Z voters, its primary vote sat below 20 per cent, well behind Labor and the Greens. With Millennials it struggled to reach the mid-20s. Labor narrowly won out over the Gen X vote. Only among Baby Boomer voters was the Coalition the preferred choice. Among voters who speak a language other than English at home, Coalition support fell to the mid-teens. By the next election, Millennials and Gen Z plus Gen Alpha will comprise more than half the electorate. They do not approach politics as a two-party contest, are leaning left, and do not grant economic credibility by inheritance or habit.

As Redbridge’s Kos Samaras suggests, they see material issues (jobs and wages, renting and, if they choose to start a family, affordable childcare) in vastly different terms to Baby Boomers or older Gen Xers (more interested in returns on assets such as shares and property). This is the engine of generational sorting within left-right voting blocs and what, by and large, is driving Coalition voters to One Nation in record-breaking numbers.

Leadership mattered enormously in this environment. Anthony Albanese communicated a simple emotional message that has anchored successful leaders from John Curtin to Bob Hawke to John Howard: if I succeed, you succeed, to borrow a phrase from former US Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Albanese appeared grounded, authentic and safe. He did not need to inspire; he needed to reassure. Dutton, by contrast, looked angry, unpredictable and unprepared for government. As one focus group participant put it bluntly: “You can’t really trust him.”

Here the work of US political scientist M Steven Fish is also instructive. In his recent book.

Albanese’s 2026 challenge

Comeback, Fish argues that successful leaders are “high-dominance” figures – reality-shaping and conflict-embracing rather than reactive or evasive. Albanese, once he regained his footing in 2025, began to adopt this posture, ridiculing Dutton’s hyper-aggression and, alongside Jim Chalmers, dispatching Angus Taylor with a well-timed quip. Authority, not aggression, proved decisive. And it’s that high-dominance Albanese needs to recapture across 2026.

Three tests loom. First, inflation and fiscal credibility. Labor cannot allow government spending to drift upward as a share of GDP without a clear strategy. Younger and middle-income voters are acutely sensitive to debt, inflation and future tax burdens, even when they support public services in principle. An interest rate rise next Tuesday will definitely register with this group.

Second, housing. Demand-side subsidies have lost credibility. Labor must demonstrate seriousness on supply and build and build and build – including embracing high-quality manufactured (also known as modular) housing at scale – or risk losing the trust of a generation for whom housing insecurity is becoming permanent.

Third, fairness between generations. Younger Australians believe the tax system is stacked against them. They’re right. As Labor luminary Bill Kelty argues, indexing income tax thresholds to inflation and rebalancing concessions that overwhelmingly benefit asset-rich older Australians can speak directly to the intergenerational bargain that has been broken.

Labor’s task now is to govern in a way that reduces fear rather than provokes it. Because at the next election, voters will do what they always do: feel first, decide quickly, and justify later. In politics, people do not remember what you said. They remember what you did to make their lives better and how you made them feel. Labor won in 2025 because it felt right. In 2026 and beyond, feeling right will be harder, and more important, than ever.