Pollytics

Politics, elections and piffle plinking

Newspoll Quarterly

July 3, 2009 – 10:33 am, by Possum Comitatus

Newspoll via The Oz have released their latest 3 month aggregation of federal polling, broken down into age, gender and geographical cohorts. The thing to remember when looking at the results here is that it is effectively the average of the last 3 months, so it contains Newspolls that have been good and bad for each party and doesn’t reflect the political zeitgeist of the moment, but rather the wash out of the April to June period.

I’ve rejigged the Newspoll Quarterly page (also easily accessible via the sidebar), so you can access static charts of the historical series going back to 1996, plus two spiffy new flash apps for the results from the 2007 election onward. The apps let you view the polling metrics by cohort, or the polling cohorts by metric - you just have to choose which way you prefer to look at it. The charts have mouseover functions, so the data value of each observation will pop up when you put your mouse on it.

Now we have these breakdowns, all sorts of interesting things can be done, starting later today with some election simulations where we combine these Newspoll results with the Nielsen poll results and run the polling aggregates through some monte carlo simulations to see what would have happened were an election held and the polling results repeated.

So, check out the trends while I crunch some numbers on the sims.

UPDATE:

Let me know if the flash apps arent appearing in your browser properly from the Newspoll Quarterly page - there seems to be issues mounting the files properly. was mounting problems, but it seems to be fixed. It should all be working spiffy now.

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How bad was Turnbull’s Satisfaction Plunge?

July 2, 2009 – 9:09 am, by Possum Comitatus

To throw into perspective just how bad the last Newspoll was for Malcolm Turnbull’s satisfaction rating dynamics, it might be worth comparing Turnbull’s poll result with the historically worse cases of satisfaction rating plummets over the last 20 odd years of Newspoll.

If we take take the monthly average of the satisfaction, dissatisfaction (and consequently, net satisfaction) ratings for Opposition leaders going back to December 1985, we can measure the largest single month changes to see how Malcolm compares. It’s probably also worth having a squiz at the largest changes that occurred over a 2 month period as well - just to see the historical context of how things might pan out.

To start with, we’ll have a look at all of the single monthly drops in the satisfaction ratings for oppositions leaders that were ten points or greater, and we’ll do the same with drops 10 points or greater that occurred over 2 months:

1monopsat 2monopsat

We can also do exactly the same thing for the increase in dissatisfaction ratings of Opposition leaders: Read More »

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Victorian Newspoll -ALP Solidish Edition

June 30, 2009 – 3:11 pm, by Possum Comitatus

Newspoll via The Oz have released a Victorian State poll - usually these jobbies come in every two months, but we havent had one since February. The primaries come in at 42 (down 4) / 37 (up 3) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 56/44 the same way - a 4 point gain to the Coalition since last poll. This come from a sample of 1150, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.

Worth noting is the general decline in the net-satisfaction levels of both the Labor government and Liberal opposition, with the government dropping 10 points to come in at 11, while the Opposition dropped 7 points to come in at negative 9. The other thing worth mentioning is the continuing rise of the Green vote over the last 2 to 3 years, firstly at the net expense of the broad “Others” vote, then later at the broad net expense of Labor - with the Libs seeming to lose a few while the Greens grew right at the end of the series.

The usual charts come in like this: Read More »

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Has good ALP polling boosted the Australian Economy?

June 30, 2009 – 10:08 am, by Possum Comitatus

It’s only partially a tongue in cheek question.

Newspoll has released their biannual poll on Living Standards that’s well worth a squiz – although The Oz seems to have ignored it for some reason. The poll was done over the weekend, so it has the same sample size of 1200 that we witnessed with the voting intention questions – giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.8% mark.

Newspoll asked the question:

Thinking now about your standard of living. Do you believe your standard of living in the next six months will improve, stay the same or get worse?

What is really interesting about the results is the way partisan identification skews the positive, negative and neutral perceptions of how a respondent’s standard of living will evolve over the next six months –  quite significantly at that - leading to a somewhat amusing question at the end. First off though, this is how the headline numbers come in (click to expand) :

lstotal

Standard of living polls are like are like foundational versions of consumer confidence polls.

Consumer confidence surveys run one of two ways. In various flavours they either ask a respondent how they believe everyone else will react in the near future to economic circumstances, or they ask a respondent how they believe they will personally react to economic circumstances in the near future. Yet in both cases it’s a derivative question because most actual economic behaviour on the ground is driven by ones standard of living, driven by ones personal economic circumstance. Consumer confidence surveys usually aren’t explicit in asking a respondent where they believe their own circumstances will be in the future, but ask instead about a respondents future reactions to those circumstances – but the actual circumstances themselves are left hanging in a sort of implied haze.

What standard of living polls do and what consumer confidence surveys usually don’t, is cut through that haze and go straight to the core question – do you think your personal and economic circumstances will improve, get worse or stay they same.

What is striking about the headline results are the way Australians have suddenly returned to normality in their future perceptions. The June 2009 results are statistically identical to the results obtained in, say, 2006.

This is fundamentally good news!

The results go to the Read More »

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Pollytrend - Where the polling now sits.

June 29, 2009 – 4:31 pm, by Possum Comitatus

The end of the trend is nigh. Plugging the poll figures from this cycle into our Pollytrend algorithm - the locally weighted polynomial regression we run through an All Pollster pooled aggregation weighted by sample size -  shows how  the medium term trend running against the ALP since April has now bottomed out, even popping back up towards them a notch. If we compare the current Pollytrend line with the trend line that we had during the last polling cycle two weeks ago, the turnaround has been quite sharp - what we’ve witnessed this week in the polling has been quite an unusual event:

pollytrendlargej29If the Morgan Phone poll taken last weekend also shows an increase in the ALP’s vote when it’s released later this week, that upswing will be slightly sharper still.

Over on the sidebar on the top right, the longer Pollytrend series  has been updated to place it in historical perspective and the poll averages underneath it are all current, including the latest Essential Report.

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Essential Report - Ozcar Fallout Edition

June 29, 2009 – 4:29 pm, by Possum Comitatus

This week’s Essential Report comes in with the primaries running 48 (up 1) /36 (down 1) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 58/42 the same way– a one point increase since last week. This comes from a rolling 2 week sample of 2006 giving an MoE that maxes out around the 2.2% mark.

Essential asked additional questions this week on descriptions of Rudd and Turnbull, approval ratings, how Utegate changed opinion and the CPRS. These ran off a sample of 1145 for an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark.We’ll also throw in the additional questions from Galaxy and Newspoll that me missed earlier as we go through.

First up, Essential asked the following on Approval - the smaller charts can be expanded.

Do you strongly approve, approve, disapprove or strongly disapprove of the job Kevin Rudd is doing as Prime Minister?

ruddapprov

ruddapstrength rudddisapstrength

The cross tabs said: Read More »

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Turnbull no Latham - try Downer

June 29, 2009 – 4:18 pm, by Possum Comitatus

This was a piece I had in the Crikey mail earlier today.

When it comes to unsuccessful Opposition Leaders, some burn their way through public goodwill slowly, while others like Peacock, never really had any goodwill to begin with  — but in the modern history of federal leaders of the Opposition, there have been only two that have burnt their public approval like phosphorus.

Forget the comparisons of Turnbull being like Nelson or Latham  — no, we have to go all the way back to Alexander Downer to find a situation in any way comparable to that which the Coalition now finds itself in.

While the problem of political support always comes back to vote estimates  — they are essentially the only polling metric that really counts  — the satisfaction/approval ratings of a leader have an uncanny knack of becoming a threshold test for short term electoral success. Forget “Preferred Prime Minister”  — it’s a meaningless beauty contest that rides on the coat tails of the vote estimates, the action is with the satisfaction ratings.

Once an Opposition leader has more people disapproving of their performance than approving, warning bells start to sound. However once an Opposition leader has significantly more people disapproving of their performance than approving, their vote  — and their electoral fortunes  — are generally set in concrete.

If we look at the net satisfaction ratings of every leader of the Opposition over the last two decades at the ninth month of their leadership (or in the case of Downer, the 8th since he couldn’t make nine)  — Turnbull finds himself in auspicious company.

netsats9month

Compared to Turnbull, after nine months of leadership Nelson looked positively popular, Crean was Read More »

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Malcolm Turnbull - a Ute Full of Pain

June 29, 2009 – 7:28 am, by Possum Comitatus

Galaxy, Newspoll and Nielsen have all come out today showing Malcolm Turnbull has crashed – and it really is Malcolm Turnbull that has crashed rather than the Coalition as a whole.

First up the vote estimates and how they’ve changed since the last poll of each of the three pollsters:

votestimatesj29

We’re now back in the 56-58 two party preferred territory that Labor has been experiencing for most of the last two and a half years. All of the Coalition’s hard work since April on the debt and deficit argument has been flushed down the toilet in a week. Unfortunately for the Coalition, this is the good news – and it really is good news considering the size of the bad news - the satisfaction/approval ratings of Turnbull himself.

satapprovs

Those numbers are simply incredible.To highlight the change that went on over the last week or two, the net satisfaction charts of Nielsen and Newspoll are worth a squiz. To see the composition of the net satisfaction, we’ll also throw in Turnbull’s  Newspoll satisfaction ratings. (click to enlarge).

Read More »

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Same Sex Marriage - Polling at odds with Parliament.

June 25, 2009 – 1:07 pm, by Possum Comitatus

With Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young introducing a private members Bill into the Senate seeking to grant same-sex couples equal marriage rights, it is well worth looking at the recent Galaxy poll on this very issue to demonstrate just how far behind the Australian population our political representatives are.

The Galaxy poll taken on the 29-31 May 2009 asked the following question:

Do you agree or disagree that same sex couples should be able to marry in Australia?

In 31 of the 32 demographic cohorts measured, a majority of Australians support same sex marriage with only the over 50’s being the odd cohort out, where in that unique case the against held a plurality lead of 49 to 45.

I’ve thrown all of the results into paired charts below  - blue for Total Agree broken down into strongly agree/agree and red for the disagree responses. Just click the charts to expand, and the margins of error for each of the 192 cohort responses are provided in a couple of tables at the bottom. Some of the MoE’s are quite large because the sub-samples were quite small. But the one thing the results clearly show is our political representatives are far, far behind the curve of public opinion when it comes to the legal recognition of same sex marriages in Australia. It does make you wonder.

Results by Australian Total and Gender, plus by Age

genderagenderd . ageaaged

Read More »

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Holy Treasury Moley Batman.Polling, Trust and Malcolm Turnbull.

June 24, 2009 – 9:14 am, by Possum Comitatus

What started out as a conniption over the gift of a second hand car has quickly descended into scandal over gifts of second-hand information.

If Grech turns out to be the long suspected Treasury Mole – the one that brought us such hits as Cabinet dissent over Fuelwatch and leaked correspondence between RBA Governor Glen Stevens and Treasury head Ken Henry over the bank guarantee – while his fate is sealed with future meals of porridge, the Coalition was perfectly entitled to use whatever information came their way. Unless there was some really deep conspiracy going on where the Coalition was actively engaged in the procurement of sensitive information, they have nothing to fear but public opprobrium. And let’s face it, this is Australia – we don’t do deep conspiracy or scandal very well.

Berlusconi – with his 30 women, a transsexual TV star and a pile of coke – now that’s how you do scandal! We get stuck with bloody utes and leaked correspondence between policy wonks in blue suits.

The problem for the Coalition becomes one of how people will come to view this behaviour and how their actions will affect the framing of, to use that dreaded word, a “narrative”.

There’s only been three polls taken that have measured the public perception of Turnbull’s personality traits – an Essential Report and Newspoll taken in September 2008 when Truffles first assumed the leadership – which make them little more than initial public first impressions. Then we had a Galaxy last month that measured a few of the same things.

Running through the results with Essential first, then Newspoll followed by the recent Galaxy: Read More »

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