Only one looks like falling to Labor while another is on a knife-edge. Falling short: Labor leader Bill Shorten. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The findings lend further weight to the theory that the 2016 election has developed two distinct tracks and while Labor has done well with its national campaign, it is being outgunned in many of the pivotal local races that will determine the make up of the House of Representatives. But the outlook for the Turnbull government is anything but certain, with as many as two Nick Xenophon-aligned lower house candidates set to displace established Liberals in what would be an election-night bombshell.

Another single-seat poll published on Friday evening conducted for the Seven Network in the regional South Australian Liberal jewel of Grey put the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) candidate easily ahead of the sitting member Rowan Ramsey. Not quite in the clear: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Credit:Mick Tsikas And that increases the chances of a hung parliament after July 2 in which the Coalition falls short of the 76-seat minimum needed and a clutch of independents and Xenophon-aligned lower house MPs would decide who becomes prime minister. The surprisingly strong NXT vote in Grey and Mayo suggests the new group's statewide support could be even stronger than predicted and perhaps enough to see the high profile senator re-elected along with as many as three of his running mates giving it significant power in both houses. The result follows five weeks of campaigning and suggests Mr Shorten's policy-driven campaign approach has put Labor in a strong position through regaining disaffected long-term Labor voters – many of them in safe Labor seats already held – but that its ground campaigns in the outer-metropolitan swing-seats is patchier.

The ReachTEL polling was conducted on the evening of Thursday, June 9, following a week of gathering focus on economic management sparked by Labor's admission that it will first deepen the deficit over four years before improving the bottom line over the next decade. That brought derision from the government, which claimed it showed Labor would never deliver a surplus if elected. But Labor countered that its negative gearing and capital gains tax increases were "structural" repairs to revenue and would thus convince rating agencies to retain Australia's triple-A credit rating. Labor would probably need to win all six marginal seats and have the Xenophon candidate Rebekha Sharkie elected in Mayo held by the former infrastructure minister Jamie Briggs, to have a realistic chance of claiming the 21-seat haul needed for a one-seat majority. The polling was commissioned by Fairfax Media with the aim of understanding where the campaigns are biting and what is likely to happen at the local level on election day. While the last Fairfax-Ipsos poll showed a 4.5 per cent swing away from the Turnbull government across the country, it is doing much better in the marginals by-and-large, with a 4.5 per cent swing recorded only in the northern metropolitan Perth seat of Cowan, taking that contest to a dead-heat at 50-50.

In the others seats – leaving aside Mayo where the parliamentary future of Jamie Briggs is looking extremely bleak in the face of the NXT onslaught – the swing is well under 4.5 per cent and is even in the positive direction for sitting Coalition MPs in both Bonner at 2.3 per cent, and Lindsay at 1 per cent. Lindsay, in Sydney's west, has received special prime ministerial attention after its first-term MP, Fiona Scott, found herself at the centre of an internal Liberal Party backlash over the perception she supported Mr Turnbull against Tony Abbott in last year's leadership ballot. In Dobell, widely expected to return to Labor after a boundary change, Labor's Emma McBride leads 51 per cent to 49 against the Liberals' Karen McNamara, but even here, the swing is just 0.8 per cent, according to the survey of 628 people. Underpinning the more resilient Coalition vote across the marginal seats is Mr Turnbull's lead as preferred prime minister and the nomination by voters of the economy as the predominant issue over hospitals, schools, climate change, industrial relations, and national security. Mr Turnbull led Mr Shorten easily in each of the individual seat survey except for Cowan where Mr Shorten is in front 52 to 48. Even in Dobell, where Labor is ahead on two-party-preferred, Mr Turnbull was the favoured alternative as prime minister 53.5 to 46.5.

Loading In every seat however, voters said the economy – a traditional strength for the Coalition over Labor – had been the biggest influence on their decision to back one side over the other. Follow us on Twitter