Our Gold Coast sample is a little small – 48 respondents – so this is more like 5 focus groups than a poll, but it still gives indicators as to what is likely to be happening on a larger scale.

One of these is that none of the contenders for Lord Mayor is highly-regarded. Another is that the two major challengers are seen to be too close to the development community and “development” is the most frequently mentioned “most important issue” when responses are analysed using the Leximancer software.

I also hand-coded the “most important issue” responses to give another perspective. That coding revealed that “integrity” was the most important theme, according to 23% of respondents. The table below cross references the hand-coded issues with voting intentions.

People who are worried about integrity are most likely to vote for Clarke, and then for Molhoek, but none for Tate. Clarke is an independent, Molhoek has his UniteGC team and Tate is the first ever Liberal candidate for mayor of the Gold Coast.

The relationship between developers and council has long been an issue on the coast, and this was brought into sharp focus over the last term with CMC investigations into councilors who posed as independents but secretly ran as a team with developer funding. The last term of council has also been viewed as a mess, for this and other reasons.

Clarke scores for a number of reasons. A quarter of his supporters think that he has a good record, while 15% support “the devil they know”. Another 15% think he could have done better in his first term, but has learnt. Molhoek’s supporters are mostly attracted by his character, while Tate scores marks for ability (frequently because he is an engineer).

Another issue on the Gold Coast is the introduction of party politics into council elections. The Liberal Party is running a full team. Sixty-seven percent of voters do not want party politics on the Gold Coast, and this may have had an effect on their vote. Tate, the Liberal candidate, attracts 78% of his support from the 23% who support party politics on the coast, suggesting that the party issue puts a ceiling on how well he might do. Traditional Liberal voters are almost evenly split on the issue. They are also split on whether to vote for Tate with 21% of them voting for Clarke and 14% for Molhoek.

I am not predicting that Clarke will win. The sample is too small to be reliable, and without both Liberal and Labor parties contesting this election I have trouble weighting results to approximate the real world. Even if our figures are correct it is possible that his two major opponents might be able to stitch together a preference deal that combines with changes in voting intention between now and election day to give one or the other of them the job.

If Clarke does win it will be another problem for the Liberals, who have put the whole weight of their headquarters team into the campaign. Brisbane is the only other area where they are running, and that campaign is conducted from close to the Lord Mayor's office. The Gold Coast is meant to be a beach-head to respectability for their current administration, but it will be a beach head to quicksand if they don’t win the election.