The Liberal Party is left grappling with how to catch up with the voters.

Its two leading candidates to replace him, Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop, besieged by colleagues to move against Abbott, are now considering their options.

A Fairfax-Ipsos poll finds that seven people out of ten are confident that Bill Shorten will lead his party to the next federal election. But only three in ten say that of Abbott.

The implication is that everyone else expects, or perhaps hopes, that his prime ministership is over.

This is a potent finding. Because it seems to refute the chief argument against removing Abbott as leader.

In the internal Liberal debate, the strongest objection to a coup is that it would reduce the Liberals to the same status of "chaos and dysfunction" as Labor achieved under the Rudd and Gillard governments.

"We would be crazy to repeat the experience of the last Labor government," the Attorney-General, George Brandis, told Sky News.

And, as Shorten observed yesterday, the Liberals' agonisings are the "exact same debate, and it's happening even quicker than it happened under Labor."

The difference, however, is that the public was shocked by the lightning coup against Kevin Rudd, who was a popular figure at the time.

But if the great bulk of voters already expects that Abbott will be removed before the election, the situation is quite different.

"The question we're asking ourselves is, 'Should we gamble on giving Abbott another chance?'" poses a Liberal backbencher.

"It's easier and seductive to say we should. But many of the colleagues are saying, we've given him a lot of forgiveness already, and what have we got for it?'"

The emphatic defeat on Saturday of a one-term Liberal National government in Queensland sent a jolt of fear through federal Liberals.

It is the second time in three months that a conservative State government has been thrown out after a single term. Victoria's was the other.

The Liberals have taken two messages from this. First is that the electorate is more volatile.

This augurs badly for a first-term federal government that has been consistently behind in the polls for ten months. The stock assumption that a federal government can fully expect at least two terms is under deep doubt.

"We can't say whether this government would be defeated at the next election," said the former Fairfax pollster John Stirton. It is, after all, not even at the halfway point of its term.

"But we can say that if any federal government were going to lose after a single term, this one is more likely than any of those before it."

Abbott is more unpopular than Julia Gillard, a byword for unpopularity, at the same point in her term: "And that's really something," says pollster Jess Elgood of Ipsos.

The second lesson from the defeat in Queensland is that insofar as Abbott had an influence, it was powerfully harmful for the conservatives.

The people seem ready for the dispatch of Abbott. The Liberals are working towards it.