One Nation’s Senate succession debacle yesterday brought a sudden end to a dream run for the party through the first half of its Queensland election campaign.

Last week’s media coverage was wall-to-wall Pauline Hanson, whose photo graced the Courier-Mail more often than that of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, and more than twice as often as that of the Opposition Leader Tim Nicholls.

Hanson’s party also appeared to be benefiting from the harsh experience of the Western Australian election in March, which demonstrated how little it had to gain, and how much to lose, from preference trading with the Coalition.

This time around, One Nation is being given nearly everything it could have hoped to bargain for out of the LNP, who are favouring it over Labor in 53 of the 61 seats in which it is running, without it offering anything meaningful in return.

Absent the squabbling over preference policy that defined the WA campaign, the media has had to feed its appetite for all things Hanson with obliging coverage of her “battlers’ bus” tour, and its attendant photo opportunities with star-struck locals in regional Queensland.

This has been reflected in persistently encouraging opinion polls, the most recent of which have recorded a three-point rise in the party’s statewide vote to 18%, and raised the outside chance of an upset win in the Labor-held Brisbane fringe seat of Logan – not exceptionally strong turf for the party historically.

But as impressive as such results may seem, it’s far from clear they have justified expectations that the party stands poised to tear the election wide open.

To help consider what One Nation’s poll ratings might mean in practice, web programmer Alex Jago has developed a dazzlingly useful online tool that converts vote shares into modelled seat outcomes based on voting and preference data from last year’s federal election.

This suggests a One Nation vote in the low 20s would reel in a seat total in double figures, just as it did when 22.7% converted into 11 seats for the party in 1998.

However, as the vote share fall into the teens, the number of seats diminishes rapidly – to the extent that even the 18% attributed to the party by Galaxy Research could net as few as four seats.

In that scenario, One Nation’s influence could be exerted not through its cherished hope of gaining the balance of power, but through the rather less exciting prospect of its preference flows determining which major party tips over to a majority.

According to a ReachTEL poll in the Courier-Mail yesterday, that could very well be the Liberal-National Party, who three-quarters of One Nation-supporting respondents said they would put ahead of Labor.

However, pollsters have a notoriously hard time getting an accurate picture on preference flows from their respondents, and there are few precedents for One Nation preferences breaking as cleanly in favour of one party as the ReachTEL numbers indicate.

Labor’s campaign has left much to be desired over the past fortnight, having been dominated by a confusing backflip on Adani that angered the project’s supporters without mollifying its opponents.

But with yesterday’s developments, the campaign looks like ending as Palaszczuk always hoped it might: with One Nation in disarray, the LNP tainted by association with it through its preference strategy, and Labor credibly able to pitch itself as the only plausible option for those who favour stable majority government.