Essential Report will be out later today, apparently with a big bag of questions – so to tie us over until then it might be interesting to have a squiz at net satisfaction ratings of every Leader of the Opposition going back to Howard in the late 80’s. Net satisfaction ratings tell us whether more people are satisfied than not with the leadership of a given person- but it’s often a proxy for the behaviour of the political party itself. I’ve also added the net satisfaction proportions of just decided voters – which excludes the uncommitted/undecided/don’t know group the satisfaction rating question. The way these two measurements move together tells us quite a bit about the way undecideds have broken.
An important part of net satisfaction ratings are their impact on the way undecided and nominally soft voters behave in the ballot booth, where the personality of the leader in question can play an important role in determining whether Party A or Party B will ultimately end up with their TPP vote.
For these, I’ve used Newspoll.
UPDATE
Now available in new stacked line chart flavour!
21 Comments
What would these look like as stacked line charts – with dissatisfaction on the bottom, undecided in the middle and satisfaction on top? That would be a good way of seeing where the undecideds are moving.
Caf – just had a play around, is this what you’re after?
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/files/2009/02/hewsontest.png
If it’s any good let me know and I’ll do it for all of them.
Geez Possum, you do like them graphs! So looking into your crystal ball what do we see for MT? The trend isn’t looking promising for him…
Grog – it reminds me a lot of Mark Latham.
Grog – given the ESP II bastardry, MT’s figures are going to look even worse. The ALP can constantly bash the Libs/Nats with the fact that they were the only ones opposing help for the economy in a time of crisis. Bashing Barnaby for failing to get any goodies for his constituents could be another fruitful line of attack.
Possum: Yep that’s it. That one shows pretty clearly that with Hewson the undecideds initially split pretty evenly, then after that they crystallised out as dissatisfieds for the next year, before reaching a pretty steady state.
Rudd’s one is interesting – after the intial assessments were made, the satisfieds remained roughly the same while the undecideds slowly turned to dissatisfieds.
Even though the undecideds seem to be very slowly peeling against Rudd, he seems to have a rock solid satisfaction rating – higher and stronger than all previous opposition leaders.
Oh agreed, Rudd’s chart is by far the best one to have there.
It looks like “satisfied” decisions are made quickly, whereas “dissatisified” is a slow burn. Apart from the initial “getting to know you” phase, there’s not much evidence there of undecideds becoming satisfied.
I wonder how important Sunrise was in terms of giving originally undecided folks a positive disposition towards him?
Peacock’s chart is pretty depressing for a leader – makes you wonder why they bothered.
I’m not sure about the Sunrise connection – the initial part of Rudd’s followed a similar pattern to Latham (!) and Downer (!!).
What happened in Oct 2004 to turn Latham from a winner to a loser? Without that, Latham would be PM
A Federal Election happened
An election campaign DR!
so in that case – it was the campaign that had the greatest effect
For a moment there i thought Possum was designing a new nerdy logo for Pepsi
Pepsi – that’s spooky.
Polli Max – the Psephological Cola
Interesting (to me at least) that Beazley I spent most of his tenure in positive territory with only a slow net decline while Beazley II showed the same pattern of initial positives followed by a sharp decline to big negatives also shown by Downer and Crean. Indeed, the Beazley I graph is a lot like the Howard II graph stretched over a longer period, except that Howard II won while Beazley I lost twice.
Also interesting (again to me at least) that both Howard and Beazley returned to the job with much higher net satisfactions than when they previously lost or relinquished it, but perhaps that just reflects relief at the removal of their immediate predecessors at the time when they returned.
Also interesting is the way that Turnbull had no starting bulge in his undecideds. Even Howard and Beazley the sequels experienced a bit of an undecided bulge to start with – but strangely Turnbull seems to have been a relatively more known quantity to the public that two blokes with 20 year political histories including party leaders and election losses.
Go figure that out!
anyone who didn’t know exactly what type of low life Howard was from his time in the Fraser government wasn’t paying attention or wasn’t born.