Everywhere he went, Dutton had a reverse Midas touch for Liberal candidates

Hitting 25 seats, including two stops each in the Melbourne seat of Macnamara and his former electorate of Dickson, it was supposed to be a final blitz to lead the Coalition to victory.

Instead, Mr Dutton is now out of a job after his marginal seat fell to Labor challenger Ali France and the Liberal party is in crisis after a shattering loss that's left the Coalition on track to hold fewer than half the 76 seats needed to form government.

ACM was with him every step of the final losing lap, in which the Coalition failed to elect a candidate in a single electorate visited by Mr Dutton.

After the Liberal campaign bus hit a literal roadblock on Monday morning, Mr Dutton visited key battleground seats in Sydney and Melbourne during the first half of the week including Menzies, Aston, Chisholm, Bennelong and Reid, but his attempt to bring back Chinese voters who'd abandoned the Coalition in 2022 appeared to have failed.

Mr Dutton also swept through a handful of Melbourne electorates, including a sit-down meal at a Chinese restaurant in the marginal electorate of Chisholm, but his quest to win over the local community again fell flat.

On Wednesday night, Mr Dutton attended a Liberal party function at the Tower Hotel in Melbourne's Hawthorn East - in teal independent Monique Ryan's seat of Kooyong - with a select few members of the press.

In what became a repeated tactic that appeared calculated to try and control the narrative, most of the Canberra press gallery journalists on the campaign bus were not invited.

But, like much of the media strategy, it failed.

The bizarre interactions between Mr Dutton and Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer, who failed to win back the seat previously held by former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, were captured by photographers.

The disjointed image of Ms Hamer staring ahead with a horror-movie facial expression and Mr Dutton awkwardly grimacing inspired countless memes, and seemed to sum up the wider campaign's demise.

Those at the event say Mr Dutton appeared to leave his candidate out in the cold while circling the room, in some kind of attack of social awkwardness.

It's now being speculated that the Coalition received some damning polling figures around this time.

The next morning, instead of hitting an early voting booth, Mr Dutton took the media pack to the Pine Rivers RSL in his electorate of Dickson, where he launched the 2025 Red Shield Appeal on behalf of his subbranch.

It was an odd choice for a final campaign week stop.

Then it was off to Tasmania to hit AgFest with Liberal candidate for Lyons Susie Bower, who failed to dislodge Labor MP Rebecca White from the marginal electorate - despite a solid performance by Mr Dutton, whose walk through the event culminated in a made-for-television chat with toddlers pushing toy diggers in a sandpit.

Thursday night was spent hyping up the Liberal volunteers at a rally in Adelaide, held at a pub in the marginal seat of Sturt.

Anti-nuclear protesters waited outside the venue in what had become a common sight at Mr Dutton's campaign visits.

Mr Dutton took to the stage to declare the Coalition would win the election, Liberal MP James Stevens would hold his seat with an increased margin and candidate Nicolle Flint would win her former seat of Boothby back for the Liberals.

On all three counts, the opposite happened.

There were five electorate visits across three states on Friday, leaving journalists exhausted - although most were not invited to Curtin, where Mr Dutton's coffee stop with Liberal candidate Tom White failed to loosen teal independent Kate Chaney's hold on the formerly blue-ribbon seat in Perth.

The day begin with an early morning walk through the Adelaide farmers market in Makin, then after flying the media to Perth, Mr Dutton dodged questions about Coalition policy costings at a campervan showroom press conference in Tangney.

Mr Dutton disappeared for an hour, purposes unknown - possibly to indulge in one of his regular talkback radio interviews.

He then bused journalists an hour away to a seaside cafe visit in Pearce with Senator Linda Reynolds and the Liberal candidate, stopping for his 16th petrol station visit at Joondalup in the seat of Moore on the way to the airport.

Then came the final, ill-fated stops on election day, starting in Melbourne's Goldstein - where candidate and former Liberal MP Tim Wilson's tough-on-crime campaign fell flat - and Macnamara, where Labor MP Josh Burns held firm.

Journalists prayed the fuel stop in Gorton, the 17^th on the campaign, would be their last.

Mercifully, it was, and they marched onwards in a funereal procession towards the final stop as Mr Dutton cast his vote in Dickson.

When asked who he'd voted for, he refused to engage, irritating reporters who'd gathered to capture the moment.

Perhaps he foresaw the words being written, describing how it made no difference.