During its 42-year existence as the Liberal and Country League, it spent 34 years in government, mainly due to an electoral malapportionment scheme known as the Playmander.

The Playmander was named after LCL leader Sir Tom Playford, who was the Premier of South Australia for 27 years from 1938 until his election loss in 1965.

Encouraged by this success, the Liberal Federation (the SA branch of the United Australia Party) and the SA Country Party merged to form the LCL on 9 June 1932, with former Liberal Federation leader Richard Layton Butler as its first leader.

Millhouse, often considered during his term as the most progressive member of the LCL, continually criticised the conservative wing of the party.

The electorates consisted of rural districts enjoying a 2-to-1 advantage in the state parliament, even though they contained less than half of the population.

Even allowing for a smaller chamber, the LCL suffered heavy losses at the 1938 election, winning just 15 of 39 seats.

Only months later, Butler resigned in favour of Tom Playford to make an unsuccessful attempt to enter federal politics.

Additionally, turnout crashed to a record-low 50 percent in 1941, triggering the Playford LCL to introduce compulsory voting from the 1944 election.

The scheme allowed LCL to win sufficient parliamentary seats even when it lost the two-party vote to Labor opposition by comprehensive margins at several elections: 1944, 1953, 1962 and 1968.

O'Halleran, for instance, felt he needed to maintain a cordial relationship with Playford in hopes of getting Labor-friendly legislation through the House of Assembly.

This split mirrored the dissatisfaction amongst the Establishment faction, which had been steadily losing its power within the party and was appalled at the "nouveau riche (new money) commoners", such as Millhouse, that had infiltrated the parliamentary wing of the LCL.

Even at the height of Playford's popularity, the LCL was almost nonexistent in Adelaide, winning almost no seats in the capital outside the wealthy "eastern crescent" and the area around Glenelg and Holdfast Bay.

Despite this, the LCL party machine had become moribund as leaders had become lulled into a false sense of security due to the extended run of election wins aided by the Playmander.

Although a shadow of its former self, the reformed Country Party served as a wakeup call to Playford that there were problems within the LCL.

The lone independent in the chamber, Tom Stott, threw his support to the LCL, allowing Hall to form a minority government.

It was the first time in 20 years that the non-Labor side in South Australia had won the most seats while also winning a majority of the vote.

However, despite winning 55 percent of the two-party vote, the largest two-party-preferred margin since the end of the Playmander at the time, the Liberals only won 25 of the 47 seats.

Tonkin survived for only one term before the early 1980s recession resulted in him narrowly losing the 1982 election to Labor under John Bannon.

By 1992, however, Baker had been unable to gain much ground on Labor despite festering anger over its handling of the collapse of the State Bank of South Australia.

This gambit backfired, however, when former Tonkin minister Dean Brown returned to politics after a seven-year absence.

At that election, Brown won one of the most comprehensive state-level victories since Federation, taking 37 seats on 60.9 percent of the two-party vote and a swing of almost nine percent–in all three cases, the largest on record in South Australia.

These figures led to talk of a generation of Liberal government in South Australia, much as the 1970s had been considered a "Dunstan Decade."

By late 1996, the Liberals' poll numbers had tailed off markedly less than a year before a statutory general election.

At the 1997 state election, the Liberals withstood a swing slightly larger than the one that swept them to power four years earlier, this time 9.4 percent.

However, they only lost 11 seats, allowing Olsen to cling to power with a minority government supported by conservative crossbenchers.

It was the first time since 2002 that the non-Labor side in South Australia had won the most seats while also winning a majority of the Two-party-preferred vote.

In April 2022, David Speirs was elected as party leader, securing 18 votes compared to Josh Teague's five and Nick McBride's one.

"[15] His successor, Vincent Tarzia, MP for Hartley, was elected leader on August 12th, defeating fellow Moderate Josh Teague by 18 votes to four.

In January 2025 Jing Lee announced her resignation from SA Liberal party to become independent.

[19][20][21][22][23] Since the 1970s, five parliamentary Liberal leaders have served as Premier of South Australia: David Tonkin (1979–1982), Dean Brown (1993–1996), John Olsen (1996–2001), Rob Kerin (2001–2002) and Steven Marshall (2018–2022).