Opposition Leader Bill Shorten will campaign in Batman on Thursday amid mounting pessimism about whether Labor can hold off the Greens at Saturday's byelection.
One party source said Labor's primary vote remained stubbornly low, "in the 30s" while former Victorian Labor senator Stephen Conroy declared the seat all but lost on Wednesday.
"I still fear the worst for Batman on the weekend," he told Sky News.
Others in the party believed Labor was in with a shot, especially after the Greens campaign was marred by infighting.
An internal analysis seen by The Australian Financial Review crunches the numbers in the seat based on the vote at the last federal election. The Liberals, who scored 19.9 per cent of the primary vote at the election are not running this time.
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Under the analysis, the Liberal vote is allotted to "others" and the preferences distributed along the same lines as they fell at the 2016 election.
Under this scenario, the Greens would beat Labor by 51.5 per cent to 48.5 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.
One Greens strategist reasoned that Mr Shorten's decision to announce this week a policy to stop tax credits being paid as cash bonuses to shareholders who pay little or no tax – mainly self-funded retirees – may backfire on Labor in Batman. While the announcement may have been timed to win the left vote, it has sparked a backlash from retirees and there were 23,000 people in Batman aged over 65.
Several years ago, the Greens and the Abbott government joined forces to change the assets test, which saw 370,000 people either thrown off the pension or have their benefit reduced.
Labor suffered a setback on Wednesday after a campaign flyer mistakenly used a Greek translation in a section of text labelled as Macedonian.
Labor candidate Ged Kearney and Labor leader Bill Shorten have apologised for the gaffe, which angered members of Melbourne's Macedonian community. Ms Kearney was due to debate Greens candidate Alex Bhathal at a town hall forum on Wednesday night and protests were anticipated.
The error comes during a bitter dispute over Macedonia's use of its name, which Greece believes should be used only for one of its regions.
The flyer had policy positions translated into languages including Italian, Arabic and Vietnamese.
The World Macedonian Congress group issued an open letter, saying Ms Kearney "needs to understand the difference between Macedonian language and the Greek language".
Greens campaign organisers said a separate group of environmental protesters could attend the Labor event.
Earlier this week, Mr Shorten said Labor faced an uphill battle to hold the seat, the byelection for which was caused by the resignation of David Feeney due to dual citizenship.
One source said such pessimistic language ahead of Batman was not an attempt to garner a sympathy vote at the last minute because Greens voters were not like that. The prospect of a major party being in trouble only spurred them on to create an upset.
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