- Preferred Chief Minister: Gallagher's lead 'enormous'
- Jack Waterford: It's rates v tax reform - but who is right?
- Reaction: Leaders defend campaigns after poll results
- Key issues: Health trumps rates, jobs for voters
- Comment: Party strategists have lost their way
- Full coverage: ACT Election 2012
You've probably seen the anti-Labor election advertisements in which a typical ACT voter declares "I like Katy Gallagher but ...".
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Well, it looks the Canberra Liberals are spot on with their ads: territory voters do like Katy Gallagher.
Except there are no buts about it.
Ms Gallagher's two-to-one lead over Mr Seselja, closer to three- to-one in her electorate of Molonglo, is unassailable with three days until the booths open.
The Liberals' TV ad shows strongly that they know it too and believe they need to get the message out to voters that liking the Chief Minister doesn't mean they must vote for her.
But is it too little too late?
For four years, Zed Seselja's party has done everything it could to take the shine off Ms Gallagher's reputation with the voters, only to find now, on the cusp of the election, she is stronger than ever.
As late as June, with the Canberra Hospital data doctoring scandal still raging, the Liberals paid for a marathon two-minute TV attack on Gallagher's handling of the health portfolio.
But today's result suggests the opposition might have saved its money.
Other elements of the Liberals' campaign have pointed to a reluctance to make Saturday's election a presidential style confrontation between Ms Gallagher and Mr Seselja; the TV ads featuring Liberals' frontbenchers Alistair Coe, Steve Dozspot and Jeremy Hanson, for instance.
Even Mr Seselja's move from the Molonglo electorate to Brindabella looks designed, at least in part, to avoid a showdown with the Chief Minister.
But Katy Gallagher is only one woman and she will only appear on the ballot paper in one electorate. Despite her popularity, the Chief Minister's "team Katy" will have to win votes in their own right.
The Canberra Times' poll also contains another striking feature: the collapse of Zed Seselja's standing in the preferred Chief Minister's measure.
In the corresponding poll in 2008, the then fresh-faced newcomer was almost neck and neck with incumbent Jon Stanhope and Mr Seselja actually had his nose in front, on 43 per cent, in his home town of Tuggeranong.
Four years later he can't get above 29 per cent in Brindabella and that is his best showing as preferred Chief Minister across the three electorates.
Today's result must cast considerable doubt on the strategy and tactics that have been employed by the opposition for the past four years both to make their leader more popular and to make Katy Gallagher less so.
