Mike Baird: How NSW's Premier went from popular to the political scrapheap.

By Sarah Gerathy.

This time last year opinion polls showed New South Wales Premier Mike Baird was the most popular politician in the country, but what a difference a year makes.

A month ago, we wrote about the difficult year Mr Baird had in NSW’s top job.

This morning, he announced his shock resignation from politics — so how did it come to this?

The trouble with Mike

In the second half of 2016, Mr Baird has found himself on the political ropes, with his approval ratings pummelled and his Government plagued by leaks.

One of the interesting things about Mr Baird’s annus horribilis in 2016 is many of the characteristics for which he was initially praised have been turned on their head by his detractors.

The compassionate Christian who reached out beyond the political divide to suggest Australia should welcome more Syrian and Iraqi refugees was suddenly painted as a wowser who wanted to shut down the state’s nightlife.

The conviction politician who had been admired for making unpopular decisions if they were right for the state was labelled an arrogant leader who did not listen to his constituents.

The social media darling, whose off-beat, tongue-in-cheek posts attracted an early avalanche of likes now seems unable to post a picture without being flooded with comments describing him as glib and out of touch.

The pause and reset button

The watershed moment for the Premier was his backflip on the greyhound racing ban, which was followed by a series of smaller policy backdowns like ripples in a pond.

The greyhound move failed to save the political skin of Mr Baird’s then-deputy premier Troy Grant and it has not delivered him the hoped-for bounce in recent opinion polls.

But it did give him some breathing space by calming MPs who were starting to panic about their own political future.

It also gave the Premier the opportunity to try to recast himself with the public — and he was then at pains to emphasise how he was listening to the community.

But the backflip opened him up to a new line of attack from which he was previously immune — that he’s a flip flopper who could be bullied into a change of position when it is politically convenient.

Mr Baird’s initial popularity was built on an impression he was not like so many politicians who came before him.

But he could not recapture the wave of popularity from those heady early days.

This post originally appeared on ABC News.