Opinion polls are snapshots of moments in time. If we take this week’s Guardian Essential poll, it suggests two things – the national political contest is narrowing, and the real opponent for both Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten in the coming federal election is voter disaffection.

I’m not sure yet if the contest is narrowing. We need more field evidence. But the mail is in on disaffection, and has been for some time. In late 2016, the Australian Election Survey showed satisfaction with democracy, trust in government and loyalty to major parties had hit record lows among Australian voters, with party leaders suffering sustained falls in popularity unlike any other period in recent history.

In the last Guardian Essential poll of 2017, more than half the survey said it had been a particularly bad year for Australian politics (and this was well before the Liberals third leadership change in two terms), and there was strong support for integrity measures, like donations reform, always a neat proxy for drain the swamp.

Tracking back to this week’s poll, there’s burgeoning interest in voting for independents, with 42% of the sample flirting with that idea. The cohort tempted to vote independent in 2018 remain engaged with politics, they haven’t switched off, but more than 70% of them think neither Labor nor the Liberals have a long-term plan for the country.

Teasing out these trends provides a clearer sense of the terrain major party leaders are jousting on right now. They are fighting not just each other, but voter fatigue and disillusionment, which adds another layer of difficulty.

With this backdrop in mind, it’s interesting to chart Scott Morrison’s trajectory since taking the prime ministership in late August. Scott, the unifier, was his early message frame. The new prime minister said he would bring the Liberal party, the parliament, and the country back together. That reassured colleagues who had rallied for Morrison largely to hold out Peter Dutton.

Almost three months down the track, Morrison is tracking into less uplifting territory, and Dutton, who made himself scarce briefly after the ugly palace intrigues in August, is also back in the centre of the political action.

Elements of Dutton’s preferred playbook have come to the fore. The government is signalling it will wind back the level of immigration, something the home affairs minister has advocated for months, and it’s being tough on terrorists to the point of potentially rendering Australian citizens stateless.

Dutton, just for the record, has been trying to push the citizenship-stripping envelope since 2015, when ministers came to rhetorical blows around the cabinet table about a proposal he pushed, with Tony Abbott’s support, that the immigration minister be given extraordinary powers to strip an Australian of their sole citizenship.

The sum of the parts tells us this: the government is searching for an electrification point, something to connect it to voters less inclined to listen. It’s picking fights with Labor to try and amplify that effort. Dutton right at the moment is chasing Labor down the road, desperately hoping they’ll take a swing on encryption, or rebuff a national security proposal, allowing him to paint them as the lily-livered villains in his graphic novel.

The Coalition is in something of a quandary. They can’t govern, at least not really, given the diminished parliamentary circumstances post Wentworth, so they must campaign. They can’t campaign on their record, because there is no compelling record to run on, because the Coalition has no settled identity with the public.

Morrison is going flat out to try and build up initiatives to campaign on, in fact too flat out at the moment to knit the ideas into any kind of coherent framework, so for the public right now, looking on at the government, the only real constancy over two terms has been division and infighting.

One way to grab the contest by the throat would be a clarion local expression of the sovereignty-first populism now finding grim articulation in rightwing politics around the world – which is what the prospect of a Dutton prime ministership offered, and a majority in the Liberal party stepped back from in late August.

We’ve been lucky in Australia, at least, comparatively. Pauline Hanson likes to think she’s good at that corrosive shtick, but she isn’t really. After more than 20 years in the game, the One Nation leader remains more fringe figure rather than a genuine change agent.

We haven’t really had a political leader capable of mainstreaming nativism in the way Donald Trump has in America; a leader who can prosper by turning things deeply toxic, who can make the terror as Frank Underwood says in a Brechtian moment in the political melodrama, House of Cards.

So are we on the brink of that now?

It’s possible, but I’m really not sure, partly because I don’t think the prime minister has yet determined how far he’ll wade into whatever it takes territory. Morrison is always a difficult political figure to capture, because he’s always in flight.

The other relevant factor here is Labor’s capacity to shut down any Coalition attempt at Trumpesque electrification by matching whatever is on the table, which is the posture they’ve adopted with national security. You want to cut immigration? Cool. So do we. Let’s move on.

If you speak to government MPs in Sydney, and to a lesser extent Melbourne, they tell you immigration is white hot at the moment, not so much as an issue in itself, but as a proxy for voter frustration about over-development, and suboptimal city infrastructure, which fuels the disaffection I referenced at the opening of the column. It has become a potent symbol of governments not working, not delivering.

Before coming to the prime ministership, Morrison attempted to reason with the prevailing sentiment by arguing forcefully that the answer lay in investing more in “congestion-busting” infrastructure, not in cutting the cap.

He’s switched lanes now, in search of that elusive connection point with voters, the point that says I get it, I’m listening.

But the prime minister is also, thus far at least, approaching the tinderbox judiciously. One litmus test of that is the speech Morrison delivered this week telegraphing the cut in migration.

If you take the time to read the speech, and it’s worthwhile reading it, the proposed cut was cloaked inside a robust defence of immigration and the benefits it brings to Australia.

If we summarise the pitch, it was this: I need to hit pause for a bit because people in Sydney and Melbourne are ropable about population outstripping serviceable infrastructure, and I have to make a conciliatory gesture to them, otherwise the casualty might be public support for immigration in a country that really needs immigration to deal with the challenges of an ageing population.

Dutton or Tony Abbott, who has shape shifted in recent times from Austerity Tony to Populist Tony, would have packaged that message quite differently, which suggests to me there’s still a line there to hold.

The question is, will Morrison continue to hold it, or jump lightly over it?