With Essential Report coming back to the field this week to join the 55/45 two party preferred brigade, and with Galaxy joining the fray with the same, our Pollytrack series has crunched back towards the Coalition (the figures can be seen in the sidebar on the right)
The dramatic nature of the movement can also be seen with the high sensitivity version of our LOESS regression series.
But while the high sensitivity line and the change in Pollytrack this week might appear dramatic, the low sensitivity tracking line has been plodding along without any movement since the back end of July.
With Essential Report running large samples around the 1800 mark, any dramatic movement by them will shift the Pollytrack lines more than polls coming off much smaller samples. The big question is, have EMC ceased to have a relative lean to the ALP? This was a dramatic jump by any standards with the Essential TPP falling 4 points for the ALP and 5 points on the primaries in a week. Monday will tell.
UPDATE:
The Galaxy poll sample size hasnt been reported anywhere that I saw, for those interested in the minutia of these things it was 1004.
3 Comments
If we removed the EMC polling from the equation altogether would the resulting tracking lines look substantially different? I would imagine they would.
With Pollytrack, if we removed Essential Report, the TPP would be slightly less volatile up until around June, and about 0.75 points more favourable to the Coalition on average – with the exception of the current observation where Essential is the same as the Phone Pollsters.
If we removed Morgan Face to Face it would be a slightly larger reduction in the ALP TPP vote.
Using our regressions, Essential added about a point on to Labor and Morgan Face to Face about 1 to 1.4 points there abouts. Neither added much in the way of volatility to the low sensitivity regression line, but added nearly all of the movement to the high sensitivity line.
I don’t know quite what to make of Essential Research. They are new to us here, so it will take a few years before we have a track record from them.
As for this shift in results from them, a couple more weeks of results will either wash a rogue out of the system or re-set their benchmarks alongside the other pollsters, except for Morgan, who will remain more ALP friendly.(mostly)
Until then, we will have to take the results at face value.