After landslide victories last time, the conservative NSW and Queensland governments can expect the electoral distortion to correct itself when they head to the polls soon. But if that happens, don't blame Tony Abbott, writes Norman Abjorensen.

Landslide election wins are great for the victors at the time - but no sooner has the sound of corks popping died away and the heady buzz of the champagne receded into a fleeting memory of the night before, the problems start to appear.

What to do with an inflated backbench is always a challenge for the post-landslide leader. The clamour for reward will be loud and there will be the inevitable disappointments, but the troops have to be kept busy and onside. Then there are the unexpected arrivals - the surprise winners in seats long held by the other side and, in many cases, into whose pre-selections little thought was invested, as the LNP has found in Queensland and the Liberals in New South Wales, with gaffes, embarrassments and resignations bringing damaging negative publicity.

But the biggest downer of all is the election after the landslide. The distortions produced by a landslide almost invariably self-correct to some extent next time around as the inexorable swing of the pendulum heads back to where it came from. This means that a landslide-elected government will face a swing against it, seats will be lost and the surprise results of the previous election will almost certainly be reversed.

This is precisely where Queensland's Campbell Newman and Mike Baird in New South Wales find themselves as they head into elections, the former on January 31 and the latter on March 28. In each case, the swollen majorities offer a comfort of sorts that ordinarily would withstand a robust swing, but volatility shrinks comfort zones and a swinging pendulum can wreak havoc when it returns.

The Liberal-Nationals coalition in NSW remains ahead in the polls, and while its combined 69 seats in the 93-seat Legislative Assembly will fall, especially in the traditional Labor seats it took in 2011, it looks set to win comfortably.

Baird, as his predecessor Barry O'Farrell before him, has done little wrong politically and has not made noticeable enemies, unlike the Newman LNP government in Queensland. The NSW economy is in good shape and the ambitious transport plans by the Government, with a very visible start on the CBD light rail, is winning plaudits.

Fallout from the political donation scandals investigated by the Independent Commission Against Corruption, including the scalp last year of O'Farrell and a slew of resignations, continues to dog the Government, but the Labor opposition is still struggling to shake off the stench of the collective scandals that cost it office in 2011. The best Labor can hope for is to gain sufficient traction to put it in realistic contention in 2019.

In Queensland, the polls show both sides much closer, but Newman holds an even larger cushion, 73 seats in a house of 89, and to lose government from there would have to defy history. Yet it is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility.

The polls were dead right last time and this time they show the LNP and Labor neck-and-neck. Further, the homogeneity of Queensland electorates translates into the probability of very big swings.

The stormy three years of the first LNP government has seen the Government, with its heavy public spending reduction and cuts to the public service of some 14,000 jobs, create enemies left, right and centre, all of whom will be both vocal and spending big over the next three weeks. Unlike Baird in NSW, polling by the parties shows Newman to be personally very unpopular.

Quite apart from defending his own marginal seat of Ashgrove in Brisbane, the key challenge for Newman is to convince an electorate made sceptical by a sluggish, though still growing, economy and rising unemployment, now the nation's highest at 6.9 per cent, is that his bitter medium-term medicine will work its longer-term wonders. Can he translate the key policy initiatives of selling long-term leases for state-owned power generators, ports, and an electricity retailer, an extensive infrastructure shopping list and the approval of new mining projects, such as in the Galilee Basin, into electoral support and votes?

An added layer of complexity overlaying both elections featuring incumbent conservative governments is the vexed issue of another conservative government - the Abbott federal Government. With 14 consecutive Newspolls showing it trailing Labor since its 2013 election win, and Tony Abbott's own support flatlining, a federal presence in both campaigns is not seen as conferring any electoral advantage on either incumbent.

As if to draw attention to this, Newman himself went to the trouble of pointing out that the election was "not about Tony Abbott".

Much is made of an alleged "spillover" effect that sees the unpopularity of one party at a certain level of government adversely impacting on the same party at another level. This argument sees political parties as brands, and implicit in its assumptions is that voters do not differentiate between state and federal issues.

This might well be the case for a part of the electorate, but history suggests it is a dumbing down of political intelligence to conflate the two unthinkingly. People are actually a little smarter than the proponents of this school of thought would have us believe.

In 1975, after the sensational dismissal of the Whitlam government, and the massive swing against Labor at the ensuing poll, just six months later voters in NSW elected a Labor government for the first time in 11 years with a swing of almost 7 per cent. Yet these same voters had fled from the same party in the federal election with a punishing swing of 7.5 per cent. And as Labor continued to gain support in NSW under Neville Wran, he was rewarded just two years later, in the so-called Wranslide election, with a further swing in his favour of 8 per cent. Yet just 10 months earlier, these same voters had continued to inflict punishment on federal Labor with a negative swing of 3 per cent.

Again in NSW, voters ejected the Fahey Liberal Government in 1995 with a swing against it of just over 2 per cent, but a year later the same electorate turned on federal Labor with a huge swing that helped to send the Keating government packing.

In each case, the electorate clearly distinguished between state and federal in terms of both issues and personalities.

To be sure, neither Newman nor Baird will be earnestly pressing Abbott to join them in their campaigns, but with a strong focus on predominantly state issues in each campaign, the Prime Minister's largest presence is likely to be that of a bogeyman talked up by the opposition - and that is really like not being there at all except in effigy.

Dr Norman Abjorensen, from the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, is the author of three books on the Liberal Party and its leaders. His book on all 27 former prime ministers, The Manner of their Going, will be published in 2015. View his full profile here.