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Team Turnbull or Team Abbott?
There's no sign of the public spat between Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott abating with the former PM continuing his criticism of the party and the PM.
If Coalition marginal seat MPs were beef cows, they'd be smelling the abattoirs about now.
Monday's Newspoll put the preferred prime minister gap at 8 percentage points, 41-33 in the incumbent's favour. An untidy, divisive fortnight ago, it had been a healthier 13 points.
After becoming Prime Minister in September 2015, Mr Turnbull commanded a 34 point lead.
Prime ministers normally do pretty well on this index due to incumbency - actually doing the job.
But this government trails on everything else so it was only a matter of time before being prime minister became its own negative. To rub salt into the wound, the Opposition Leader also had a lower disapproval rating when voters were asked how well each was performing in their respective roles.
Of course, the real concern is the shockingly low party support. The Coalition's primary share is just 35 per cent - less than a third of the market when you take out the Nationals.
This makes for a landslide-losing 47-53 on two-party-preferred terms. Turnbull's leadership is now exactly halfway to the most explicit benchmark for failure ever nominated by a prime minister - the 30 losing Newspolls he presented as the open-and-shut case for Tony Abbott's removal.
Thus, another inglorious symmetry arises. Despite leading his party into office, Abbott suffered the ignominy of losing 40 votes in his own party room despite there being no challenger - the fabled "empty chair" crisis - in early 2015. Unsurprisingly, within the year he was gone.
Turnbull confronts a parallel humiliation: the prospect of being hounded from office by a man who is himself wildly unpopular with voters and who, right now, is the subject of furious anger internally.
It's hard to know who's happier: Shorten or Abbott. Both can lay legitimate claim to the Prime Minister's nosedive.
But Turnbull's poor timing has also contributed. Instead of dragging his party back to the "sensible centre" from a position of strength when he was first installed, he blinked and is now attempting this inherently difficult correction from a position of weakness.
Disappointed voters had already stopped listening.
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