COMMENT | State polls are easily underestimated. It arrives with local candidates and grievances, yet it carries a nationwide perception.

Negeri Sembilan voters will decide the composition of a 36-seat assembly on Aug 1. At first glance, it is merely another state election in an already crowded electoral calendar.

Nevertheless, it is something rather more consequential, the first meaningful audit of the unity government coalition since Pakatan Harapan and BN began the incongruous experiment of governing as partners rather than as adversaries.

State elections have long served as barometers of national confidence, offering an early reading of local sentiments that only later register at the federal level.

They test not policy but chemistry, not manifestos but...