Following a week of blunders and own goals, downcast senior Liberals seem to think only a miracle can save the seat of Wentworth.
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And, while Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his colleagues will undoubtedly dump on the former member Malcolm Turnbull for refusing to support Dave Sharma as his successor, they really only have themselves to blame.
Any one of the debacles that have made this week a walk through hell for the new PM and his acolytes would have been sufficient to give the Coalition eight to 10 days of bad headlines on its own.
Things began to unravel late last week when Morrison failed to immediately rule out any suggestion religious schools should be allowed to expel gay students.
Then, just as things may have started to settle down, Liberal Senators voted for a Pauline Hanson bill built around a slogan made infamous by white supremacists. Not satisfied to own the mistake, the party explained it away by stating errant members had only been doing what they were told.
Then, with pressure mounting to salvage as much of the Wentworth vote as possible, the PM did the obvious (to him) thing by dragging global politics into a by-election. He reached out to the Jewish 12 per cent of electorate by offering to consider relocating Australia's Israel embassy to Jerusalem.
It worked well enough for Donald Trump last December so why wouldn't it work for Morrison? The short answer is because this is not America and Morrison is not Donald Trump.
While the ploy has presumably done little or nothing to lock in new Jewish votes, it has done an excellent job of trashing bipartisan agreement on Middle East policy and of threatening to drag down the Australia-Indonesia relationship.
All of this was further compounded by emerging confusion over Coalition policy on the asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru and, of course, Barnaby Joyce's latest "it's all about me" moment which came at the worst possible time.
The last thing Morrison needs while he is still trying to move public opinion on from how he got this job is a leadership bloodbath in the Coalition's junior partner.
He'd better get used to the idea however. The talk is Michael McCormack could be gone by the end of the month.
Ironically, because of the complex web of preferences built around the presence of 16 candidates on the ballot paper and the ALP's understanding that the best way for it to keep Sharma out is for its own candidate to run dead, if the Libs do win it could be by a good margin.
The most telling indication of how the Libs have performed will come from comparing Sharma's primary vote to that cast for Turnbull in 2016 when he retained the seat with an 18 per cent margin.
The Liberal Party's failure in the "Super Saturday" by-elections in July is what ultimately cost Malcolm Turnbull the prime ministership.
Another such defeat for the Liberals will give the ALP a lot of ammunition to use between now and the federal election in the first half of 2019.