Around 9pm on super Saturday night, the LNP’s Queensland president, Gary Spence, told an ABC reporter in Longman it was “hard to know exactly what tonight’s result tells us”.

Sorry Gary, but it really isn’t that hard.

Just for Gary’s benefit, let’s work through it. Labor’s primary vote in a Queensland marginal seat had a four in front of it. The LNP’s vote had a two in front of it.

That’s called a thumping, and a thumping in the sort of electoral terrain that will determine the outcome of the next federal election.

What that result tells us is the LNP is organisationally weak in a state where strength is required. Queensland matters, because Queensland possesses enough marginal seats to determine who occupies the Lodge, and the next election is less than 12 months away.

The LNP has recently lost a state election, and the dismal performance in Longman suggests the party is no closer to finding its mojo on challenging electoral terrain.

It’s true Saturday’s Longman result is a vote at a byelection, and voters in byelections feel entirely safe in sending the government of the day a stuff-you message. It’s not a general election. All that’s true.

But let’s be very clear. This result is ominous for the Turnbull government.

What it shows is Labor’s campaign machine is stronger on the ground, has the resources to run a very long contest and still have financial firepower at the end; and also possesses a message with sufficient political resonance to connect with the disaffection rife in the Australian community, particularly in Queensland.

This latter point about zeitgeist is particularly important. If you can’t connect with voter alienation in the current political climate, and find your own way to speak to it, you will not win elections.

Politics in Australia was once about appealing to the swinging centre, the people who determined the outcome of elections. With major party hegemony on the wane, and the landscape littered with disruptors, modern campaigning is now about precision narrowcasting: base activation of the rusted-ons overlayed with a precision courtship to those rusted-off.

It requires dexterity. It requires something more focused and thought through than Peter Dutton determining at five minutes to midnight that it’s time to fire up the moral panic about migration and see if that peels 3% off Pauline Hanson’s vote in Longman.

It requires an ongoing conversation. God forbid, it might even require some emotional intelligence.

Given the national polls for the first six months of this year have showed the major party contest tightening and Turnbull enjoying a recovery in his approval ratings, the wake-up call from Queensland will send a chill through the government.

Surely the take home message from Saturday night is that different parts of Australia might need different messages – that the Coalition’s core election pitch might need a bit of work.

By contrast, Saturday night’s result will likely calm Labor’s collective nerves – which have been rubbed red raw in recent weeks – and help to convince many people with doubts that Bill Shorten and the formidable Labor machine that sits behind him can deliver victory in a poll less than 12 months away.

Shorten had only one message for the doubters, both internal and external, on Saturday night: keep on underestimating me by all means, then get out of my way, stand back and watch me win.