Yvonne Keane was preselected shortly before the campaign was called. Credit:Fiona Morris The polling On election eve, party figures were being told of big swings away from Labor in the key seats of Barton in Sydney's south and Werriwa, to its west. Some research had them as too close to call, one Liberal insider said. Early Labor research registered a similar, looming swing in Barton. That would have been a shocking upset. Werriwa, Gough Whitlam's old seat, has not left Labor's hands in living memory. A redistribution had turned Barton into a Labor seat and it had a star candidate, Linda Burney. The sitting Liberal MP, Nick Varvaris, could not decide whether to run. This was not last-minute big-noting. It was built into the party's strategy. The Prime Minister spent some crucial final hours in Barton, having Yum Cha and singled out Ned Mannoun, the candidate for Werriwa, as a great hope in a speech in the dying hours of the campaign.

In the end, the swings were to Labor and they romped it in. Labor won Barton by almost 59-41 and Werriwa by a similar margin. Outgoing Liberal Party federal director Tony Nutt. Credit:Andrew Meares National polls got it right. The Fairfax-Ipsos poll was just about dead right. But parties are too reliant on robocalls for local seats. Many voters have stopped picking up. Certain kinds of voters, ethnic voters especially, don't answer. Some political partisans do. As one Liberal said: "That polling was stuffed. Unless it's coming from a bloke standing outside Woolworths with a clipboard, I just don't believe it anymore." A party spokeswoman declined to comment on its internal polling.

Candidate selection Many key candidates were not selected for the Liberal Party until very late in the piece - and some not until the campaign was underway. Mr Mannoun, the candidate for Werriwa, was announced mid-campaign. Yvonne Keane, the star candidate for Greenway, a seat the Liberals counted as a big hope, was installed just before the election was called. (An intense factional wrangle was behind the delay.) Many Labor candidates, such as Lindsay's Emma Husar, were pre-selected late last year. She claimed the seat with a 4.6 per cent swing. "That crucified them," said a key Labor source. "The result would have been much tighter."

Campaigning on the cheap Fairfax exclusively revealed months out from the election that the Liberals were down $4 million because of a dispute with the Electoral Commission over donations. That seriously hurt the Liberals in a campaign insiders say was run on the cheap. Instead of sending expensive - $1 a pop – postal vote applications to voters as a piece of personally addressed mail from their MPs, the Liberals went for a flyer that looked more like a piece of junk mail at about 8 cents a go. "That decision amazed a lot of us," one senior Liberal said. Labor also nearly abandoned its postal vote strategy, opting to mail only a very select few residents.

But, as one Liberal said, and is being reflected in the party's hopes now, postal votes are much more important to the conservative side of politics and generally used by older voters, especially in winter. "These people are our key voters and we're expecting them to go online and download an application form?" said one senior Liberal. Angering the minor parties In three key seats, Lindsay, Greenway and Macquarie – two of which Labor won and the other which it retained with a better-than-expected performance – preferences from minor parties helped Labor get over the line. "We had a range of small parties supporting them," said a Labor source. "That was because of general anti-government sentiment but also resentment."

The government's reforms to the Senate voting system intended to knock many of the minor parties that relied on complex preference deals out of existence. They returned the favour on Saturday. Not going negative One Liberal MP told a meeting of its parliamentary party room five months out from the election that they were being inundated with concerns about Medicare privatisation from voters. But many in the party believed that message was ignored and the party failed to counter with its own negative campaigning, despite some messages about Labor's reputation for instability and a hurt to the housing market being brought to the fore.