Is the Coalition's own polling beginning to worry O'Farrell in the lead up to the Clarence by-election?

The Federal seat of Page and the state seat of Clarence sit squarely in the middle of NSW Nationals country.

In Australian electoral history Labor has only won Page at four general elections and Clarence at three elections – one a by-election.

In 2007 the Nationals Chris Gulaptis stood in Nationals safe federal seat of Page which had been held by the Ian Causley for six years until his retirement – and lost it with a -7.83% swing against him.

In October 2011 the Nationals once again picked Gulaptis to stand in the Nationals safe state seat of Clarence held by Steve Cansdell for eight years until his resignation in September 2011. In March this year Cansdell had been re-elected with a +19.8% swing towards the Nationals.

Since Gulaptis’ most recent nomination a number of Clarence Valley residents tell me they have been phone polled twice by ReachTEL, the North Coast Nationals favoured opinion pollster.

Co-incidentally the Nationals have twice gone public with statements such as these:

· "I predict a swing against us which is why Chris will have to shake as many hands as possible and knock on as many doors as possible to secure his role as a member of government that will be in for at least two terms," Mr Stoner said.

· Describing Mr Gulaptis' chances in the by-election, Mr O'Farrell said Clarence was "an absolutely tough seat". But he said the coalition had a good candidate in Mr Gulaptis to retain Clarence. "I sat in state parliament when a Labor member of parliament represented solidly this seat. "We take nothing for granted, in politics 51% is a win, I'll settle for 51%."

Gulapatis himself has been reduced to a racing analogy:

"A [ballot] draw's a draw, everybody is in the same boat," he said. "It's a big field, it's a wet track and we will see what happens at the end of the day."

One could be forgiven for thinking that the polling results sitting on Barry O’Farrell and Andrew Stoner’s desks in Sydney are not favorable to their candidate and that the Nationals are looking at losing quite a few percentage points off their very comfortable 31.4% tpp margin in this seat - something NSW Labor would not let them forget in a hurry.