It was Richard Nixon who first grasped the political reality that in the age of visual media, image is everything.

In 1952, as a vice-presidential candidate threatened by a secret expense fund scandal, he distracted public scrutiny by staging an unprecedented live television speech. In front of 60 million viewers, Nixon depicted himself not as the paranoid, ambitious schemer he was, but as a man of the people, making careful reference to his wife’s humble clothing and his daughter’s pet dog.

The confection worked – again and again. Although continued involvement in “dirty tricks” scandals did destroy Nixon, it took another 22 years. He was into his second term as president before the cascades of facts finally unleashed by the Watergate investigation were profuse enough to wash away the layers of his sugar-coating.

But every western democracy – Australia included – lives in the political consequence of Nixon’s early realisation. While the votes of ordinary folks continue to determine who leads and who doesn’t, if you’re a conservative party leader whose policies, say, skew taxation to reward the rich at the expense of the ordinary, constructing an image of one’s ordinariness is electorally crucial.

Get it right, and you’re John Howard; his unpretentious suburban image allowed him to preside over a decade of privatisations and tax cuts that transferred vast amounts public wealth to private hands. But get it wrong, and you’re Joe Hockey, whose careless indulgence of a budget night cigar incinerated trust in his economic judgment, and the credibility of his parliamentary career.

Whether the fate of Howard or Hockey awaits our current conservative prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has become one of the most fun questions on offer in this pre-election twilight. Because what is becoming clear from poll results, political behaviour and the developing media narrative of the campaign is that this election is going to be fought on class lines.

Turnbull is our richest-ever prime minister, and the former lawyer and merchant banker has an image challenge ahead, for electoral information reveals that the swing seat voter earns below-average income levels, has lower graduation levels and is statistically most likely affected by the insecurity of casualised work.

These voters who determine our election outcomes may share a country with Malcolm Turnbull, but they don’t share a culture; they are the working and lower-middle class.

And from the Point Piper pad to the mysterious investments in the Cayman Islands, it’s clear from Turnbull’s policy priorities that he is so blue-ribbon you could crochet a big blue jumper out of him. Turnbull’s budget preference is for even bigger corporate tax cuts while on 1 July, his government will inflict costs for basic health services on the urine tests, blood tests, pap-smears and ultrasounds of ordinary people.

I never thought I’d live to write this, but when it came to courting the electorate, Tony Abbott was more shrewd. In 2013, in pursuit of “Tony’s tradies”, he drawled out his vowels, was ubiquitous in high-vis, sank beers like a true pub companion and got himself very photographed at sporting events.

Abbott came a cropper because – like any Cylon – he could replicate the look of these people, but not their values. In order, health, economic security, jobs, tax fairness and education dominate present policy concerns in this community. Abbott’s blatant breaking of promises on these fronts was the end of him far more than any dumb prank with an onion.

Fresh leadership brought fresh expectations but as the policies have remained the same, Turnbull’s image gamble has been to temper his vast wealth with a hard-luck backstory, of being raised by a single father in the living horror of, um, “flats”.

But a story that may convince a journalist that his youth “wasn’t a log cabin, but it wasn’t far off” with a Nixon-like pat of the rhetorical dog does not square for actual working class people when they learn young Turnbull was a boarder at Sydney Grammar School, that he was still only a uni student when he purchased his first inner-city Sydney investment property and that, aged 27, his inheritance from his from his Dad included another flat as well as an 800 hectare property neighbouring Kerry Packer’s at Scone. If all that adds up to not far off a log cabin, the rest of us were raised in wet holes of mud.

The danger of repeating a story about yourself so many times is coming to believe it. This perhaps explains Turnbull’s cringeworthy defence of negative gearing this week, insistent that a Sydney family minimising their taxable income by buying a house for their one-year-old child were just ordinary “mum and dad” investors rather than in the privileged, tiny 10% of taxpayers who’ve bought the privilege of paying less tax because they also have the wealth to buy property.

Truckies gathered at a rally protesting the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal’s introduction of minimum pay rates in Canberra, 17 April 2016. Photograph: Van Badham/The Guardian

Last week, too, he made much of a truckie “crisis” to disband a tribunal that no one had ever heard of but who governed minimum pay-rates and conditions for Australian drivers. His praise of working men and women standing up to, um, fair pay and workplace safety was never about the tribunal so much as a potential photo op with blue-collar art direction.

The much-hyped “truckie convoy” on Canberra only amounted to 32 trucks, some unclear financial backing and creative photocropping of the PM in his charcoal suit, over-enunciating inclusive pronouns to a crowd that did not even fill the corner of a carpark. I should know – I was there, doing recon for an ACTU speaking gig the next day where speakers from the marginal seats of Herbert, Gilmore and Dobell were far more concerned with youth unemployment rates about to hit 20% than a handful “owner-drivers” demanding their right to a pay cut.

Meanwhile, Labor is gaining poll numbers that were unimaginable in the Turnbull honeymoon of six months ago by making policy targets of the banks, corporations and wealthy tax gougers with whom Turnbull is so easily aligned.

Image is everything in politics – and Bill Shorten has Turnbull to thank for helping to create his, because while Shorten also attended an expensive private school, graduated from an establishment university and socialises at the big end of town, the effect of the Coalition trying to snare him in their trade union royal commission, their relentless union-bashing of the man and classist jibes like Scott Morrison’s denouncement of Shorten’s “ill-fitting suit” have actually served to cement the image of the docker’s-son-turned-union-boss as the one whose connection with ordinary working Australians is sincere.

The resulting contrast illuminates the insincerity of Turnbull’s theatrical attempts to ingratiate himself, Abbott-like, with the labouring classes. Also last week, the PM suddenly declared an affinity for the sport of AFL, all the way from China.

Come 2 July, he’ll be hoping fans remember only his vocal avowals, rather than how only last year the man who would rule us all left his grand final seats empty while toddled off to chat with Chris Hemsworth.